
A- 

riot- 



Book 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH 
Series II. Vol. I, No. 1. 



BYRON AND BYRONISM 
IN AMERICA 



3 sr$T 



This Monograph has been approved by the Department 
of English in Columbia University as a contribution to 
knowledge worthy of publication. 

A. H. THORNDIKE, 

Secretary. 



BYRON AND BYRONISM 
IN AMERICA 



BY 

WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD, Ph.D. 




jfteto pork 

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1907 

All rights reserved 









Press of 

THE New era Printing Company 

Lancaster. Pa 



Decipit exemplar viiiis imitabile . . . 

O imilatores, servum pecus, ut mihi saepe 
bilem, saepe iocum vesiri mover e tumultus. 

Horace, Epistles i, xix. 



PREFACE 



THIS investigation was undertaken at the suggestion of 
Prof. G. R. Carpenter, in partial fulfilment of the 
requirements for the doctorate at Columbia University. 
Most studies of American literary history have dealt with 
a few distinguished men ; the milieu in which they lived, 
though frequently touched on in criticism or biography, is 
but just beginning to occupy the special student. These 
pages form a very modest, but, I trust not useless, contri- 
bution to our knowledge of that milieu. 

America, true to its principle of democratic freedom, 
has expressed itself very fully : every man or woman, who 
has had, or has thought he has had, something to say, has 
said it — and printed it. This has not been an unmixed 
blessing ; the result has often served to make us ridiculous. 
But it may also serve as a valuable record of the American 
mind, which in its weakness, no less than in its strength, 
has its interest, even where it has not always its attain- 
ment. An accumulation of such research work as Prof. 
Cairns' account of early magazine literature, Prof. Smyth's 
Philadelphia Magazines, and Mr. F. H. Wilkins' Early 
Influence of German Literature, could not but be of much 
service to that future historian of American Literature, 
whose task may be rather to trace conditions and tenden- 
cies — provincialism and imitation, the beginnings of na- 
tionalism, the finding of speech, the effect of social and 
political environment, of immigration and race-fusion, etc. 
— than the achievements of individuals. 



vi Preface. 

This essay might, perhaps, have been planned on a 
more speculative, and, for that reason to some readers, a 
more interesting basis ; but the materials were found very- 
recalcitrant and confusing, and it was felt that any arrange- 
ment, other than a chronicle of facts under simple heads, 
would have but a specious clearness. Moreover, as it 
could not be premised that the reader would be familiar 
with the greater portion of the materials to be discussed, 
there might otherwise have seemed an unintentional fac- 
titiousness in the reflections. 

I must especially thank Prof. K. D. Biilbring of Bonn, 
Germany, whose lectures and seminar aroused a long dor- 
mant interest in Byron, and Prof. W. P. Trent of Columbia 
University, whose understanding of America stimulated, 
after a prolonged sojourn in Europe, my interest in our own 
literary life. I am indebted to the Library of the Uni- 
versity at Bonn for opportunity to gather, during the summer 
before last, materials for the introductory chapter; for the 
rest to the courtesies of the Lenox and Astor Libraries of 
New York, the Public Library and the Athenseum of Bos- 
ton, the Library of Harvard University, and that of Brown 
University, where Prof. W. C. Bronson obtained for me 
the privileges of the Harris Collection of American Verse. 
To the unfailing courtesies of Mr. Erb of the Columbia 
Library, in common with many students of the University, 
I owe also not a little. I am indebted to my father for 
editorial suggestions and to The Nichols Press for courte- 
sies in the printing. But circumstances, attending both 
the preparation and the proofreading, may have somewhat 
hindered me in turning all this kind assistance to best ac- 
count, and I am alone responsible for any errors and other 
shortcomings that the reader may detect. 

William Ellery Leonard. 

Philadelphia, Jan. 79, 7905. 



CONTENTS. 



Preface v 

Chapter I. — Introduction — Byron on the Continent 

— Literary America before Byron i 

Chapter II. — The Beginnings. — Byron in Early News- 
papers and Magazines 19 

Chapter III. — Byron's Literary Influence, 1815-1830 36 

Chapter IV. — Byron's Literary Influence, 1830-1860 55 

Chapter V. — Byron's Sub-Literary Influence . ... 67 

Chapter VI. — Byron in American Criticism — Some 
Explanation of Byron's American Vogue — Con- 
clusion 100 

Appendix 119 

Bibliography 123 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTION. — Byron on the Continent. — Literary 
America before Byron. 

GEORGE BRANDES, the Dane, calls Byron the 
starting point for the study of nineteenth century 
literature. He is speaking of the Continent. Despite the 
tribute to Byron's fame in the two new English editions of 
Henley and of Prothero and Coleridge and some sugges- 
tion of a "Byron revival," 1 despite the historical or 
speculative interest of special students, he occupies, it is 
evident, no such high position in England or America to- 
day. " Byron is exploded for good," remarked an Eng- 
lish critic two or three years since to Prof. Biilbring, of 
the University of Bonn, who was then in England on a 
tour of orientation, and an American essayist writes under 
the rubric "Is Byron Dead ?" Nor, indeed, has Byron 
ever occupied precisely that position in England and 
America. For all the admiration of Scott, of Moore, of 
Shelley, of Arnold, among English and American poets 
who is there that reveals in his poetry the mastership of 
Byron? "There is," says Roden Noel, " little response 
in our literature, as there is in that of the Continent, to 
what is strongest and highest in Byron." 2 In England 

1 See The Wholesome Revival of Byron by P. E. More, Atlantic Monthly , 1898 ; The 
Byron Revival by W. P. Trent in The Authority of Criticism and other Essays, Scribner, 
1899. 

2 Lord Byron and his Times in Essays on Poetry and Poets, London, 188G. He says 
further : " In England the Byronic growths have taken their nourishment from the more 
morbid elements in him." 



2 Byron and Byronism in America. 

he is to be found a definite force among the minor poets, 
as Felicia Hemans, 1 Leigh Hunt, 2 Sidney Dobell, 3 Barry 
Cornwall, 4 whom Byron called 

" my gentle Euphues 
Who, they say, sets up for being a sort of moral me," 6 

Elizabeth Norton, 6 Roden Noel, 7 and the present Laureate, 
whose reply to Mrs. Stowe's famous attack is, however, 
his best claim to be named with Byron. Of England's 
great there is Byron in the first volume of Mrs. Brown- 
ing, 8 something of his mood in Swinburne, and it has been 
said 9 — I will not say it — in Tennyson's " divine despair." 
What influence he exercised on American literature, in 
the stricter sense of the word, will appear later. Words- 
worth and Keats, not Byron, are the starting points for 
what is best, poetically best at least, in English and 
American literature in the nineteenth century. 

English Byronism, except for occasional comparison, it 
is not my purpose to pursue further. But in America, it is 
certain that Byron was, up to the Civil War, a most pop- 
ular model and that Byronism was no inconsiderable phase 
in the history of our taste and culture, which deserves, 
trivial and amusing as it may often seem, to be recorded 
with some seriousness. First, however, for the sake of clear- 
ness and perspective, it may be well to review Byron's influ- 
ence on the Continent and literary America before Byron. 

1 See Modern Greece, Restoration of Arts to Italy ; the two tales, The Widow of Cre- 
centius, The Abencerrage. 

2 See Legend of Florence. 

3 See The Roman. 

4 See Marcian Colonna. 
s Don Juan, xi , 59. 

G See The Dream, The Child of the Isles. 
7 See " Byron's Grave " in appendix to his Life of Byron, 1890. 

" Matthew Arnold's early poem "Alaric at Rome," recited in Rugby School, June 12, 
1840, imitated Childe Harold, and Bulwer's early poems are Byronic. 
'•' Namely, in the Edinbztrgh Review, Oct., 1900. 



Byron on the Continent. 



I. 

Byron's vogue abroad was immense long before his 
death. His poems were translated almost as they ap- 
peared. Contemporary newspapers there, as in England 
and America, bear witness that his portrait was as familiar 
as Napoleon's 1 and to be seen in all the shop windows. 
Melancholy poseurs were wearing Byron collars and cul- 
tivating passion and remorse. 2 But he meant more to 
great souls. Goethe, who followed his career closely, 3 
translated passages from Don Juan and Manfred and 
sent the poet poetical best wishes as he embarked for 
Greece. The early dead Euphorion, symbolic birth of 
the classical and romantic spirit, in the second part of 
Faust? is none other than Byron, as Goethe has elsewhere 
testified. Of French celebrities, Madame de Stael knew 
him personally. In Italy he became among poets and 
politicians, naturally, almost one of them, and the poetic 
ideal of many a younger Italian, who, like Guerazzi, de- 
clared Byron " the dear guide of his thoughts." 5 

Nor did Byron's voice cease to be heard on the Conti- 
nent when it was hushed amid the marshes of Missolonghi, 
but it echoed on to the Caucasus, to the Pyrenees and be- 
yond ; and the people, impoverished by the Napoleonic 
wars, politically crushed by the Holy Alliance, and so- 
cially emasculated by law and custom, heard in that echo 

1 See Essais by Otto Gildemeister, Berlin, 1897. 

2 In Paris, for example, "// etait de mode alors dans Vecole romantique d'etre pale, 
lividc, verdatre, un pen cadavereux, s'il etait possible. Celh donnait Pair fatal, byronien, 
gtaour, d'evore par les passions et les rewords." — Th. Gautier, Histoire dn Romantisme, 
chap. iii. 

3 See Lebensverhdltnis zn Byron, Werke, 1833, xlvi, 221-5; Tages und Jahresheften, 
1817; Gesprdche mit Eckermann, passim ; Brandl, Goethe's Verhaltnis zn Byron, Goethe 
Jahrbnch, vol. xx, 1899 ; George Ticknor's Life, Letters and fournals, for Oct. 25, 1816. 

4 Act iii ; read especially the Tranergesang. 
"Scoria amorosa de suoi pensieri." 



4 Byron and Byronism in America. 

its universal speech. Wordsworth was at once insular 
and reflective in his poetry of optimism and of freedom ; 
Shelley had lived and sung in a world of abstractions and 
dreams ; Goethe from the Olympus of art was considering 
all phenomena of human life with that serenity, which, to 
such chafed spirits as Borne, 1 seemed almost criminal in- 
difference ; and Schiller, than whom no nobler idealist 
and patriot ever breathed, was too philosophic, emphasized 
too soberly law in freedom, and believed too profoundly 
that the test of maturity in nations, as in men, was the 
recognition of this law 2 to meet these turbulent times that 
tried men's souls. He died, moreover, early in the 
period. Byron alone had felt and grasped the facts and 
conditions, the complex mood of world-sorrow, cynicism, ( 
revolt, freedom, hope. Byron, above all men, had con- 
tributed "to reestablish in the heart of crushed and ser- 
vile Europe sentiments of dignity and human liberty." 3 

When the better days came, his influence still endured 
by virtue of his " sincerity and strength," his profound 
appeal to the emotions as in Childc Harold and the lyrics, 
and his intellectual, though not spiritual, insight in Don 
Juan, into those social vices, which transcend any particular 
time or place. His poetry, without the subtle verbal felic- 
ity which makes Keats' Hyperion or Goethe's I-phigenie 
forever untranslateable and only a half delight to any but 
a master of the English or German, probably loses less 
than that of any poet, equally great, when well done into 

1 See his Tagebiieher. It was he who said : ' l /c/i g'dbe alle Freuden meines Lebens 
fiir ein Jahr von Byron's Schmerzen /tin." 

" Was ist denn reif sein, wenn nicht ein Gesetz 
Fiir sich und fiir die Sterne anerkennen ? " 

— Wallenstein. 

3 "^4 ridestare nel cuore deW Europa servo, ed avvilita sentimentidi dignita e liberth 
umana." — Guiseppi Chiarini, Lord Byron nella politico e nella letteratura della prima 
meta del secolo. Nuova Antologia, 1891. 



Byron on the Continent. 5 

another tongue ; l and its defects of harshness, bad gram- 
mar, awkward and bizarre constructions, so obvious to 
us, the foreigner the more readily pardons, feeling them 
less. Its defects in architectonics are to him of less 
importance, for, if. a long-growing impression does not 
mislead me, the Continental reader lays relatively more 
stress on the spirit as such, than has artistic England 
of the past seventy-five years. Its blasphemy and ob- 
scenity, in so far as they are real, have never been such 
a stumbling block on the Continent 2 as in England and 
America. 

The list of Continental poets who came under Byron's 
spell is long and distinguished. In Denmark there was 
Frederich Paludan-Miiller ; s in Norway, Heinrich Werge- 
land. In Germany, Wilhelm Miiller and Chamisso wrote 
hymns on Byron's death. 4 His personality attracted both 
novelists 5 and dramatists. 6 His tales and episodes in his 
poems have been frequently worked out into novels and 

1 Let the reader, who has the German Sprachgefiihl, peruse Childe Harold in the 
splendid Spenserians of Gildemeister. Betteloni's translation of Don Juan has appealed 
to Italians, at least, as "in alcuni parti assohctamente meraviliosa." For those who read 
Dutch it maybe interesting to look at Beet's. In Russia Schukoffski's Chillon is said to 
be a classic. 

2 Yet the myth of Byron's evil origin, that caused good English dames to faint when he 
entered the room, once received some credence even in Spain. Don Marcelino Menendez 
y Pelayo in a preface to Poemas dramaticos de Lord Byron (Madrid, 1886), translated by 
Don Jose Alcali Galiano, bears indirect witness when he says: "Byron no es ya para 
nosostros aqnel pocta satanico o endiablado que llenaba de terror a nuestros padres." 

3 Cf. "Til os i Danmark forplanter lians Aand sig gjennem Frederik Paludan- 
Miiller s fortaelletide og bibelskdramatiskc DigJe. Byrons himmelstormende Aand faar 
her Daaben Jians store politiske Trods bliver til en Eneboers hvasse Satire, hans flaengende 
Haan omformes til Udtryk for en kristelig og borgerlig Morals Dommedag over Spids- 
borgerlighedens Forfaengelighed og Nydelsessyge." — Brandes, Byron, in Fremmede 
Personligheder, Copenhagen, 1889. 

4 See, respectively, Totenklage in the Griechen Lieder, 1824 ; and Lord Byron 's Letzte 
Liebe, 1827 ; also Zedlitz's Toten Kriinze, 1827. 

5 See Ernst Wilkomm, Lord Byron, ein Dichterleben , 1839, 8 vols. In England we 
have Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon, 1816, a personal attack, and Disraeli's Venetia, 
1837. 

6 See Carl Bleibtreu, Lord Byroti's Letzte Liebe, Byron's Geheimnis, the latter in 
1900 ; and Rudolph Gottschall, Lord Byron in Italien, 1847. 



6 Byron and Byronism in America. 

poems, 1 while, since 1875, there have been no less than 
five dramas on Marino Faliero? all related to Byron as 
source. His gloom is reflected in the lyrics of Grillparzer, 
of Geibel, who also has Greek poems reminiscent of 
Byron, of Lenau, and of Heine, who is " the German 
Byron." 3 In his youth Heine fancied, like many a less- 
gifted aspirant, that his mind was cast in a similar mould, 
and his early drama Ratcliff betrays its model by 
its motto and its wild, dark character. Platen's Venez- 
ianische Sonetten, in mood and imagery, recall Childe 
Harold, as do Zedliz's Toten Kranze and Heine's Reise- 
bilder. Griin's Schutt, especially part one, has similarities 
with The Prisoner of Chillon. It was in Young Ger- 
many (im jungen Deutschland) that the shallower imita- 
tion of his personality and his tales reached its height. 
But as a champion of freedom 4 he remained a living fire, 
which flamed out anew during the revolutionary upheaval 
of 1848, in Freiligrath and others. For the past thirty 
years he has been more a literary force, chiefly through 
his dramas 5 and Don Juan ; through the latter he has 
been, also, a social force. As early as 1850, Bottger 6 

1 The Prisoner of Chillon and Mazeppa were made into prose romances and Parasina 
into a drama. Gautier, in France, also dramatized Parasina. 

2 Namely, by Lindner, Kruse, Greif, Effendi and Walloch. There is one also by 
Delavigne, in French. 

3 See Felix Melchior, Heinrich Heines Verh'dltnis zu Lord Byron, Berlin, 1903. 

4 See Brandes, Der Naturalismus in England (Ger. trans, p. 96) for a discussion of 
Byron and freedom. 

5 But concerning his dramas on the German stage : "Dauerndes Besitztum der deutschen 
Buhne ist ausser Byron's Manfred — dieser aber auch nur durch die Musik—keines 
der wertvolleren englischen Dranten nach Shakespeare geblieben. Versuche der Auffuhr- 
ung sind in langen Zwischenrdumen mit alien grosser en Stiicken Byron's wiederholt 
gemacht worden ; mit daurendem Erfolg niemals. Man hat seine Poscari und den 
Marino Paliero gespielt, hat sich selbst an den Cain gewagt, mit und ohne Musik, und 
vor bald zwei Jahren wurde eine Auffiihrung des Sardanapalus in Berlin versucht 
. . . . In friiheren Zeiten, war Sardanapalus tines der Lieblingsstiicke der Berliner 
Oper, ndmlich als — Ballet!" — Eduard Engel in the Hamburger Fremden-Blatt, for 
Sept. 19, 1903. 

6 The first German to translate Byron entire ; he wrote also two Byronic tales. 



Byron on the Continent. 7 

imitated Don Juan in his Eulens^piegel '; Oelschlager's 
Novellen in Octaven (1882) in rhymes and humor, and 
Grossed Volkramslied (1890) in attitude toward society 
both acknowledge Don Juan. This masterpiece now so 
neglected at home and with us, is studied in Germany 
" to learn from it how to represent realistic Weltschmerz 
and the life of the present age." 1 The poet, who long 
figured as a leader in romanticism, has become the 
teacher of realists. 2 

In France, 3 Lamartine, who wrote in 1825 Le Dernier 
chant du -pelerinage de Childe Harold in Alexandrine 
couplets, 4 had most of Byron's Weltschmerz ; 5 Hugo in his 
oriental poems and in those odes of pain, doubt and irony, 
is often Byronic, but he was inspired most by Byron's 
passion for liberty, as was Delavigne in his Messeniennes ; 6 
De Vigny was attracted chiefly by his orientalism, es- 
pecially that of the Biblical dramas. Musset, of all poets, 
perhaps Byron's most legitimate successor, 7 and one of 
his most rapt worshippers, 8 displays most of the cynicism 

1 Prof. Ackermann, Lord Byron, Heidelberg, 1901. What Ackermann means by " real- 
istischer Weltschmerz'''' can be illustrated by a comment on Bleibtreu. His is ^Welt- 
schmerz, aber nicht in romantischer Verkl'drung, wie in der ersten H'dlfte des Jahrhunderts , 
sondem mit der re.alistischen Bitter keit und Niichternheit der Gegenwart ." 

2 "It is in Don Juan that Byron stands forth as the founder and precursor of modern 
realism in poetry." — Edinburgh Review, Oct., 1900. 

3 '•£/« poete etranger, jusqu'alors iticonmi de la plus grande partie des lecteurs fran- 
$ais a conquis en pen de temps une reputation colossale parmi nous .... bientbt 
V admiration a pris le caractere d'un engouement veritable. On n 'aplus parle que des 
chefs d'oeuvre de lord Byron.'" — Revue Encyclopedique , Jan., 1820, article by Thiesse. 

4 Translated in the 40's by W. W. Smith, of Charleston, S.C., into Spenserians. 

5 A contemporary skit runs : 

"Je n'aime pas Fenelon 
Ni ce pauvre Racine 
Mais faime Men lord Byron 
Et Monsieur Lamartine.'" 
— From the Paris journal, Le Diable Boiteux, Oct. 8, 1823. 
G Among Fauriel's Chants populaires de la Grece moderne some are translations from 
Byron. 

7 "C'est Alfred de Musset qui rapelle leplus souvent lord Byron par la forme comme 
Par le choix de ses sujets." — Alex. Buchner, Etude sur lord Byron, Cherbourg, 1874. 

8 See Confessions d^un enfant du siecle. 



8 Byron and Byronism in America. 

of Don Juan. He has, however, as in Mardoche and 
JVamouna, a more delicate fancy and a lighter touch. 

In Italy, besides Silvio Pellico, Ugo Foscolo, Manzoni, 
the head of her romantic movement, and thatnoble pessimist, 
Leopardi, 1 there was Giovanni Berchet, who, like Byron, 
hated Austria, and figures as "the Italian Byron." The 
political situation forced Berchet into exile and he made his 
home in Greece thereafter, and these two circumstances, 
somewhat paralleled in Byron's own career, were not with- 
out import for the Byronic elements in his poetry. A 
writer 2 in the Nuova Antologia declares, " In general, one 
can say that in all our political and romantic literature from 
1820 .... the influence of Byron is more or less to 
be felt." Only the specialist would have the data to con- 
trol so bold a statement, still its very possibility is signifi- 
cant ; in England or America it would be sheer nonsense. 

In Spain, Mariano Jose de Lara (1809-37), Angel 
Saavedra de Rivas and Jose de Espronceda ^1810-42) 
may be named. Espronceda, handsome, dissipated, an 
adventurer and liberal in politics, whose fiery poetry is 
drawn from his own troubled times and troubled life, 
became inevitably "the Spanish Byron." His famous 
Estudiante de Salamanca and El Diablo mundo are mod- 
elled on Don Juan? In a Spaniard, it will be remem- 
bered, in Castelar, Byron won his most enthusiastic biog- 
rapher. 

Russian poetry, as Russian society, is peculiarly in- 

1 See Giulio Monti, Giacomo Leopardi e Giorgio Byron, SUtdi Critici, Firenze, 1887 ; 
also Francesco de Sanctis, Studio sul Leopardi, Napoli. 

2 Chiarini, see supra. 

3 Caspar Nunez de Arce, who voiced the Spanish point of view in calling Byron " el 
mas grande de los poetas ingleses del siglo presented wrote his Ultima lamentacion de 
Lord Byron in ottava rima. The 17th edition was printed at Madrid in 1881. Ottava 
rima verse had long been employed in Spain ; but Don Juan may have increased its pop- 
ularity. 



Byron on the Continent. 9 

debted to Byron, and her two greatest poets were his not 
unworthy disciples. Pushkin, 1 at one time exiled to the 
Caucasus, wrote tales whose heroes and women, as in the 
Prisoner of the Caucasus (1821), were like Byron's. 
His masterpiece was, however, Eugen Ondgen (1823- 
1831). This draws on both Don Juan and Childe 
Harold, but throughout Pushkin remains Russian. Its 
descriptions and its people are depicted from his en- 
vironment. The Russian critic, Bielinski, has called 
it an encyclopedia of Russian life. 2 Lermontoff, in the 
opinion of a Russian friend 3 of the writer, betrays even 
more of Byron's influence than does Pushkin. His Hero 
of the Caucasus, in its women and grand mountain pic- 
tures, reminds one of the tales and the third canto of 
Childe Harold. Both were inspired to freedom by Byron, 
and Pushkin is recognized as the forerunner of Nihilism. 
It is well known that the Poles in their tragic national sor- 
row found in Byron a sympathetic figure ; and Mickiewitz 
said with some degree of truth, " Byron is the secret 
tie which binds the literature of the Slavs with that of the 
West." Political tyranny was not the only factor in 
Byron's Russian popularity. It was unquestionably aug- 
mented by the contrast between the barbarism of the East 
and the desire for West European culture, and presumably 
also by the circumstance that the aristocracy, which from 
social position had been attracted to Byron, was the centre 
not only of the intellectual but of the liberal movement.* 

1 See Otto Harnack, Puschkin und Byron, Essais tend Studien, Braunschweig, 1899. 

2 See Herzen, Du develop petnent des idees revolutionaires en Russie, London, 1858, on 
On'dgen; also Mickiewitz, Vorlesungen iiber sclavische Literatu?-, Leipzig, 1843. Copious 
translations from Pushkin are to be had in the new anthology of Russian poetry, edited 
by Prof. L. Werner of Harvard. 

3 Alexius Batschinski, instructor in Chemistry at the University of Moscow. 

4 In Greece, to judge from conversations with Athenian students in German Universi- 
ties, Byron is widely read, though not widely imitated. He is remembered chiefly as a soldier, 
and his portrait in military costume hangs on the walls of many Greek homes. Byron's 
centenary was celebrated in the land of his death and scarcely noticed in the land of his birth. 



io Byron and Byronism in America. 

Thus we see Byron helping to shape the destinies, artis- 
tic, political and social, of European nations. 1 In Byron's 
day conditions in America were very different. America 
had freed herself from whatever oppression she had en- 
dured ; America was new ; the hopeful national feeling 
born of the war of 1812 was indeed contemporary with the 
rise of Byron ; society was crude, unsophisticated, but at 
core healthy ; Byron could not be a great social and 
political force. His appeal was personal and literary and 
this, too, usually in a bourgeoise fashion, in the Byronic 
pose, in the Byronic Spenserian and ottava rima, in the 
Byronic lyric. De Musset wore a Byron collar, but he 
wrote La Nuit de Decembre ; Byron's American followers 
had little more than the collar. What was but a secondary 
phase of Byron's effect on the Continent, namely, Byron- 
ism in its unworthy, undignified sense, Byron travestied, 
appeared with us most dominant and almost alone. In- 
deed, the reader, who is in a general way not unfamiliar 
with Byron and with earlier literary America, could surmise 
it must have been so. 

II. 

Literature, especially verse, had always been in America 
hardly more than an intellectual exercise, yielding some 
facile and pleasing but lifeless work among persons of 
education and taste, yet more that was equally facile but 
utterly crude among persons of education without taste. 
The mob of gentlemen (and ladies) who wrote with some 
ease was, relative to the times, large and restless. They 
followed, like our early architects, 2 the approved English 

1 See Bibliography. 

2 Colonial private architecturewas based on the Queen Anne style as modified by wood ; 
church architecture followed Wren and Gibbs. Government buildings were small owing to 
insufficient grants from the Crown, but were English as far as they were anything. See 
History of Architecture by A. D. F. Hamlin, chap, xxvii, with bibliography on American 
Architecture. 



Literary America Before Byron. n 

models. Cotton Mather and other "New England Ele- 
gists'" 1 had imitated the conceits of Donne, Crashaw and 
Quarles ; Michael Wiggelsworth, the jingles of Sternhold 
and Hopkins ; Benjamin Thompson, "ye renowned poet," 
had sung King Philip's war in Dryden's heroics ; Mather 
Byles marked the new and absorbing influence of Pope, 
which can be traced even down to Dr. Holmes ; Godfrey 
and Evans 2 of Philadelphia refined their odes after Gray 
and Collins; Trumbull, Fessenden and others did clever 
Hudibrastic burlesques on American affairs ; Dwight and 
Barlow polished off huge epics after Wilkie, Glover and 
Blackstone. Addisonian essays by Virginia planters or 
New England merchant kings, with lyrics to Amaryllis by 
Cory don and Strephon, began to adorn the now flourish- 
ing magazines. 3 Examples need not be multiplied. Some- 
times we note conventionality of theme, almost always, 
even where there is something personal or American in 
theme, the same self-conscious conventionality of style, 4 
whether inane or fustian, the same inability to find or to 
use one's own voice. Freneau's little lyric, "The Wild 
Honeysuckle," is one of the very few striking exceptions 
down to 1800. There were no professional authors before 
the novelist Charles Brockden Brown ; and the only writ- 
ing combining literary finish with independence and vital- 
ity, besides that of Crevecoeur and Woolman, had been 
done by Edwards, Franklin, Thompson and Noah Webster 
in theology, biography, science and scholarship ; by Jef- 

1 See Elegies and Epitaphs, reprinted in " The Club of Odd Volumes," 1896. 

2 His "Ode on the Prospect of Peace " (1761) Kettel calls " decidedly the most finished 
production which the literature of our country could exhibit at that date." 

3 See Check List of American Magazines printed in the Eighteenth Century by Paul 
Leicester Ford, Brooklyn, 1889 ; and The Philadelphia Magazines, 1741-1850, by Albert 
H. Smyth, Phil., 1892. 

4 This reached its reductio in the " poems " of Phillis Wheatley, anegress caught young 
in the African forests, who besang Homer and addressed "General Washington " in Popian 
heroics. 



12 Byron and Byronism in America. 

ferson, Madison and Jay in polemic or philosophic politics ; 
and their aim had not been to produce literature. 

After the passing of the more somber phases of Puritan- 
ism, about 1730, J Boston, with "The Muses' Factories" 
adjacent, began to develop a provincial culture of which 
A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1744) and the 
Pietas et Gratulatio (1762) 2 are characteristic records. 
But even before the Revolution, Philadelphia was out- 
stripping her and was destined to be our chief centre of 
refinement for more than a generation, 3 when she finally 
yielded to the circles represented by the Knickerbocker 
writers of New York and by the North American Review 
essayists, and later by " The Stelligeri" our poets preemi- 
nent, of Boston. It was a Philadelphian who seems first 
to have felt and voiced the ever peculiar misfortune of the 
American bard 

" cast 

Where few the muse can relish, 
Where all the doctrine now that's told 
Is that a shining heap of gold 

Alone can man embellish." 4 

William Cliffton, in some lines to Gifford prefixed to the 

Philadelphia reprint (1799) of the Baviad and Maviad, 

lamenting 

" These cold shades these shifting skies 

Where fancy. sickens and where genius dies," 

could yet rejoice that 

" There still are found a few to whom belong 
The fire of virtue and the soul of song." 

1 Cotton Mather died in 1728. 

2 A Harvard collection of Greek, Latin and English verse, suggested by a similar offer- 
ing to the new King from the English Universities. 

3 See the introductory chapter on Pennsylvania in Literature of A. H. Smyth's Bayard 
Taylor, American Men of Letters Series, Boston, 1896 ; and A Reader's History of Ameri- 
can Literature (p. 51) by T. W. Higginson, Boston, 1903. 

4 From Evans' "Ode to Godfrey." 



Literary America Before Byron. 13 

Among these few Dennie, 1 founder and first editor of 
The Portfolio, was chief. His pseudonym was Oliver 
Oldschool, and he enjoyed being compared with Addison. 
His conservatism was characteristic of that small urban 
class which had the fostering of culture and the making 
of verse most conscientiously at heart. This was rather 
favorable than otherwise to Byron's influence in America. 

There were also literary coteries in Charleston, New 
York, Boston and Hartford, and even small towns like 
Worcester patronized letters and gossiped on the English 
poets. 2 And away from the cities, the rustic bard was 
beginning to dream and sing, while the undeveloped and 
untrained taste of the people at large may be judged from 
the inflated newspaper style satirized by "The Hartford 
Wits," from the floods of indiscriminate praise, mistaken 
for criticism, to be found in the prefaces, notes, etc., of 
obscure books, and from the admiration accorded to the 
first American Anthology, the unpromising Columbian 
Muse. 3 

A brief survey of the best American verse in the years 
just before Byron shows how well acquainted were the 
more cultured of our forefathers with current English 
models and standards of criticism, both the older and the 
newer. The above conditions, specifically American, 
aside, Byron had, it appears, the same literary tendencies 
for or against him as in England, when he awoke one 
morning- and found himself famous. Of the American 
attitude toward his person, his romantic appearance and 

1 Cf. Moore's Poems Relating to America, " Epistle to the Hon. W. E. Spencer " with 
note. Dennie was the only good thing the genial Irishman found here. 

2 Cf. "The popular English works of the day are reprinted in our country ; they are 
dispersed all over the Union ; they are found in everybody's hands ; they are made the 
subject of everybody's conversation." — W. C. Bryant, in the North American Review, 
July, 1818, paper on Solyman Brown's American Poetry. 

3 New York, 1794 ; there had been attempts at an anthology before ; see Bibliography. 



id. Byron and Byronism in America. 

life, his morals, the eccentric good and evil of his acts and 
opinions, I shall speak later. 

The once celebrated Robert Treat Paine is interesting 
as a Delia Cruscan. He exchanged, as " Menander," a 
series of effusions with Mrs. Morton as "Philenia," "a 
lady whose title," reads the note in Paine's collected verse, 1 
"to the first place among our native poetesses" was "un- 
disputed and indisputable." Royall Tyler, over the signa- 
ture "Delia Yankee," satirized the fashion like Gifford. 

Joseph Story's The Pozver of Solitude? with mottoes 
from The Seasons, The Pleasures of Memory ', and The 
Pleasures of Imagination, with its sentimental frontis- 
piece 3 (a hermit, book in hand, before a cave by a wooded 
river), opens in smooth imitation of The Pleasures of Hope 
and embraces in its two protracted cantos of heroics the 
moods, the ideas and the style prevalent in England during 
the latter half of the century. The moralizing, the pen- 
sive melancholy natural to the subject, appearing again in 
his "Monodies" after "The Graveyard School," the mild 
humanitarian sentimentality — he describes and mourns a 
country girl, seduced and deserted — the sympathy for 
evening and quiet, neat landscapes, the domestic pictures, 
the romantic pleasures in 

" The mouldered turret and the moonlight main," 

reappearing in a poem "in imitation of Lewis' Alonzo and 
Imogene," and the interest in 

" fairy tales or legendary woe," 

reappearing in an ode on "The Druid Rites," relate him 
by turns to Goldsmith, Akenside, Blair, Campbell, Gray, 

1 Works, Boston, 1812. 

- Second Edition "with other poems," Salem, 1804. 

3 Engraved by J. Aiken, Newburyport. 



Literary America Before Byron. 15 

Crabbe, Collins, Horace Walpole, "Monk" Lewis and 
Anne Radcliffe. 1 

The Poems 2 of Susanna Rowson, "Preceptress of the 
Ladies' Academy, Newton, Mass.," though much inferior, 
have the same sentimentality and the same moralizing 
tone, while the Poems* "of the late Dr. John Shaw" show 
traces of young "Anacreon" Moore and especially of 
MacPherson. 4 As early as 1786, Joseph B. Ladd had 
tried at Ossian ; Sewall's Versions' — Ossian in heroics — 
was published in 18 10. The Foresters of the ornitholo- 
gist Wilson 6 distinctly recalls Cowper ; The Sylphs of the 
Seasons, delicate work by the artist Allston, 7 reminds one 
somewhat of his friend Coleridge, though neither is imi- 
tative. 

If the somewhat conventional older poetry was still pop- 
ular, the new was absorbed here as rapidly as in England 
and its effects were visible at once. In The American 
Miscellany , Original and Selected? for example, we note 
Burns' "Wallace," bits from Paradise Lost and Blair's 
Grave, Shenstone's Schoolmistress, Collins' Eclogues, 
which, with a translation of a Turkish ode in heroics, in- 
dicates the charm already exercised by the Orient, Gray's 

1 For " gruesome romanticism" in America see especially Freneau's House of Night, 1786. 

2 Boston, 1804. 

3 Philadelphia and Baltimore, 1810. 

4 He had begun also a poem in blank verse, " The Wanderer," to exemplify " the wild 
idea " that "genius was totally incompatible with prudence and that superior abilities were 
a full excuse for extravagance and irregularity." Though he had sense enough to abandon 
it, "the wild idea" is worth noting, as indicative of the new romanticism. This "wild 
idea " was soon to affect the Byronic bards. 

B Sewall also versified Washington's Farewell Address, Portsmouth, N.H., 1798. The 
name of Trumbull's popular burlesque is also an indication of the popularity of Ossian as 
early as the early days of the Revolution. 

(i In The Portfolio, 1809. 

7 It possesses something of the imagination and terror of his painting but nothing of its 
massiveness. 

8 Philadelphia, 1807. 



1 6 Byron and Byronism in America. 

"Elegy," Campbell's " Exile of Erin," Moore's "Ballad 
of the Dismal Swamp," Southey's "Complaint of the 
Poor," and most noteworthy, The Ancient Mariner in full. 
Among original poems there are "Monodies" and "Ele- 
gies" on the death of Burns, "The Prostitute," described 
with Goldsmith's humanitarianism and Goldsmith's num- 
bers, imitations of Moore's lyrics and a tale of Words- 
worthian simplicity on "The Idiot." 1 

With the birth of the national spirit in 1812, and for a 
generation following, when we felt that we had justified 
ourselves before the world, before England especially, in 
politics and in material progress, the long-increasing de- 
sire for an American, for a national, literature became 
almost a monomania : it had been unanimously decided, 
says Lowell 2 , that we should have one. Great singers 
ought to be born among us to celebrate American scenery, 
deeds, heroes; 3 but they could not (it seems to have been 
felt by the singers, though repudiated by some of the 
critics) be great without winning England's approval, and 
without casting their Americanism, as ever before, in the 
moulds furnished by England. So Bryant became "the 

1 The style was early parodied with us as in England. See Fessenden's skit, " Direc- 
tions for doing- poetry in the simple style of Southey, Wordsworth and other modern metre- 
mongers." A foot-note says: "There is an inflated species of simplicity, consisting of 
exaggerations of thought expressed by colloquial barbarisms, mixed with occasional pom- 
posity of diction, which it is the object of the above to ridicule." But he is thinking espec- 
ially of Southey. It is to be found appended to The Terrible Tractoratio?i (1803), 4th Ed., 
Boston, 1837. 

2 In his review of Ward's Percival ; for some contemporary documents bearing on this 
point, see Bibliography. 

3 A sensible, restrained and noble expression of the idea, which was so universally 
trumpeted up and down the land without sense, restraint or nobility, is this : " Why should 
these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart 
is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn and not in any geography of fame. Massachu- 
setts, Connecticut River and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names 
of foreign and classic topography. But here we are ; and, if we tarry a little, we may come 
to learn that here is best." — Emerson, Heroism, Essays, first series (1841) . Dwight's Green- 
field Hill (1794), was an early result of this feeling. 



Literary America Before Byron. 17 

American Wordsworth," Mrs. Sigourney " the American 
Hemans." That was the highest praise. 1 If the cultivation 
of verse had been before but an exercise, it was now a 
duty. Thus an increased impulse was given to talent, 
but no less to vanity and fatuity. Many a misguided 
author lamented in a prose preface our native poverty in 
poetry only to hint that perhaps his own would be adjudged 
the mighty desideratum. 2 Byron was a great poet over- 
seas, an English poet. This was itself enough to make 
him popular and a popular model ; but there were elements 
in him, not always his greatest, as has been said, which, 
though, to a certain extent, sources of popularity elsewhere, 
were peculiarly fitted to make him popular and the popular 
model with us. Yet no one writer ever became the Ameri- 
can Byron ; Lowell said he himself knew ten, and they 
were in sooth legion. 

But we can scarcely reason to any purpose on the phe- 
nomena without a detailed investigation. I must ask the 
student, bearing in mind what has been remarked on both 
Byron and American verse, to examine now a considerable 
body of Byronic material, that we may return later to our 
proposition, when more familiar with the facts. In the 
remarks on Byron in European literature, attention has 
been called but to names ; the student's acquaintance or 



1 Cf. " The number of educated and cultivated minds is rapidly advancing and the excess 
will, whether it be by way of attaining a high accomplishment, of finding relief from ennui, 
or of earning a livelihood, devote their leisure exclusively to literature and thus become the 
Johnsons and the Goldsmiths, the Southeys and the Scotts, the Campbells and the 
Byrons of America." — Prof. George Tucker, University of Virginia, in a lecture on Ameri- 
can Literature printed in the Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond), vol. iv., 1838. 

Dearborn, the publisher of Byron's complete works (1836), was called " the American 
Murray." See also the Fable for Critics. 

2 A fellow countryman whom fate concealed by naming him Smith (Elbert H.) may be 
instanced. In 1 849 appeared his Ma-Ka- Tai-me-she-Kia-Kiak or Black Hawk, " a national 
poem in six cantos," which was "dedicated to all the lovers of the arts of Poesy and the 
Belles Lettres and to all the friends and patrons of American enterprise and home industry." 



18 Byron and Byronism in America. 

the possibility of his acquainting himself, has been taken 
for granted. Many names that must follow are either 
unknown or inaccessible, and those that are not will still be 
dwelt on for completeness. Thus I shall quote at length. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE BEGINNINGS. — Byron in Early Newspapers and 

Magazines. 

GOODRICH, the prolific, useful and sometime famous 
Peter Parley, described in his Recollections x the be- 
ginnings of Byronism in America, more especially in 
New England, as follows: "Campbell's Pleasures of 
Hope, and Roger's Pleasures of Memory," he says, 
"were favorite poems from 1810-15 2 and during the 
same period, Thaddeus of Warsaw, The Scottish Chiefs, 
The Pastor's Fireside, by Jane Porter, Sanford and 
Merton, by Day, Belinda, Leonora, Patronage, by Miss 
Edgeworth, and Caelebs in Search of a Wife, by Hannah 
More, were types of the popular taste in tales and ro- 
mances. It was, therefore, a fearful plunge from this 
elevated moral tone in literature into the dreary if not 
blasphemous scepticisms of the new poet .... By 
degrees the public eye — admitted to these gloomy cav- 
ernous regions of thought — became adjusted to their dim 
and dusky atmosphere .... What was at first 
revolting became a fascination 3 .... In about five 
or six years after the appearance of the first canto (sic) 

1 Recollections of a Lifetime, 2 vols. New York, 1857, vol. ii., p. 103ff. 

2 He speaks elsewhere (vol. ii., p. 100) also of Scott's early popularity, saying that his 
sister had The Lady of the Lake by heart, and that " all young poets were inoculated with 
the octa {sic) syllabic verse." 

3 " Comments on French society and on some of Byron's poems also show, in an indi- 
rect way, that the people were not thoroughly familiar with vice A large part 

of would-be fashionable society was in the position of the college freshman who wants to 
be dissipated and doesn't know how."— W. B. Cairns, On the Development of American 
Literature from 1813-1833, page 10, Bulletin of Univ. of Wis., 1898. 



20 Byron and Byronism in America. 

of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage the whole poetic world 
had become Byronic. Aspiring young rhymsters now 
affected the Spenserian stanza, misanthropy and scepti- 
cism J .... In vain .... the pulpit opened 
its thunders against them (i.e. his poems) ; teachers 
warned their pupils, parents their children. I remember 
as late as 1820 that some booksellers refused to sell them, 
regarding them as infidel publications. About this time a 
publisher of Hartford declined being concerned in stereo- 
typing an edition of them .... Byron could no 
more be kept at bay than the cholera." 2 

The New England Galaxy (Boston) testified : 3 " Every- 
thing from the poetical mint of his Lordship passes cur- 
rent and is bought up with little less avidity than our 
merchants in the China trade by (sic) Spanish milled dol- 
lars." And George Ticknor wrote in his diary : 4 "He 
(Byron) has very often expressed to me his satisfaction at 
finding that his works were printed and read in America 
— he spoke to me of the American edition of his poems 5 

1 Every village had " its little Byron, its self-tormenting scoffer at morality, its gloomy 
misanthropist in song." — H. W. Longfellow, North American Review, Jan., 1832, in 
Defense of Poetry. For personal confessions of rustic juvenile Byronism, see My Own 
Story (p. 55-57; by J. T. Trowbridge, Boston, 1903. 

2 He says, too, that Byron paved the way for the sensualities of Paul de Kock and the 
deism of George Sand (!). 

3 In a review of Beppo with selections, date of June 26, 1818. 

4 See Life, dates of June 20, 21, 1815. 

6 On visiting the " Ontario," in Leghorn harbor, May 21, 1822, Byron found in one of 
the officer's rooms a copy of the New York edition of his poems. " He took it up with 
every appearance of pleasure and seemed to interpret it as an earnest of his fame." — 
George Bancroft, History of the Battle of Lake Erie and Miscellaneoiis Papers, N.Y., 1891. 
Byron speaks several times in his diaries and letters with similar feelings of his American 
reputation ; he at one time cherished the hope to visit America (see " Ode to Venice "). 

From this volume I will transcribe a little-known anecdote characteristic of Byron's 
popularity and gallantry, as well as of the American lady abroad. This same day Byron 
also visited the frigate " Constitution." " One lady of great personal beauty put out her 
hand, and saying, ' when I return to Philadelphia my friends will ask for some token that I 
have spoken with Lord Byron,' she gently took a rose which he wore in the buttonhole of 
his black frock coat. He was pleased with the unaffected boldness and the next day sent 
her a charming note and a copy of Outlines to Faust as a more durable memento." What 
became of the rose, the note, and the Outlines, I cannot say ; but the copy of Don Juan, 
which Byron, a day or so later, gave to Bancroft, is now in the Lenox Library. 



The Beginnings. 21 

which I had sent him." Though deprecating his English 
Bards, " he did not express the least regret when I told 
him that it was circulated in America almost as extensively 
as his other poems" .... "Byron wondered," 
moreover, " that our booksellers could find a profit in re- 
printing the Hours of Idleness." These explicit con- 
temporary documents may well introduce the evidence 
below. 

For the earliest beginnings one must go to the news- 
papers and magazines. Apart from some news of the 
day and local matter, one will find there innumerable 
translations from the Greek Anthology and Horace, orig- 
inal Latin verses, heroic epistles to this or that forgotten 
worthy of Boston, New York or Philadelphia, spring 
poems of many a youth " who has just passed his seven- 
teenth birthday," excerpts from and imitations of the Brit- 
ish poets — Shakespere, Milton, Waller, Pope, Southey, 
Moore, Campbell, Burns, being, perhaps, the most pop- 
ular — and paragraphs from " unpublished poems read be- 
fore the X Literary Society," with perennial " Fourth 

of July Odes." 1 Relatively more space seems then to 
have been given, in the newspapers, at least, to poetry, 
while the magazines differed especially in their depend- 
ence on England, on her books 2 and periodicals, for ideas 
and material in both prose and verse. 3 One notes that the 
reading public was less interested in the daily news and 
more confined to the upper classes ; but the display of 
learning proves nothing for superior culture. On the con- 

1 There are two signed " Mr. W. C. Bryant " in the New England Palladium, July, 
1814-15. 

2 The shameless activity of the pirating book-trade precludes an explanation on the 
ground of relative inaccessibility of complete editions of new works. 

3 Analogous to-day is the relation which the German-American press with its 600 
newspapers and magazines bears to that of the Fatherland. Analogous, too, is its con- 
stant reiteration of its unhappy dependence. 



22 Byron and Byronism in America. 

trary, the Greek translations were, apparently, college 
exercises, from that once famous text book, the Graeca 
Majora, while the Latin verses were often incorrect where 
they were not filched direct from the college classics. 

Byron's name and influence appear soon, and with ever 
increasing frequency. We can trace Byron in book re- 
views, book-sellers' notices, in poems "addressed to his 
Lordship," in extracts from his works, in direct imitations 
and in quantities of verse, merely hinting of Byron. 
These elements may be presented in order. 

The earliest reference, which has come under my no- 
tice, is in the Portfolio (Phil.) for March, 1809. It is a 
single page review of the Hours of Idleness. One would 
observe with amusement to-day that it follows directly 
upon a review of Wordsworth's Poems where the apostle 
is said to have " mistaken silliness for simplicity." A 
word maybe quoted: — "George Gordon, Lord Byron, 
the author of these poems, had not at the time of their ap- 
pearance completed his twentieth year. Many of them 
are written with spirit and force ; some with much sweet- 
ness " — the critic then admits defects of versification and 
grammar, but pleads for the youth of the poet. Two se- 
lections are appended. 1 In May, 181 1, is a twelve-page 
original 2 review of the English Bards. It speaks of 
Byron as one of Gifford's retainers and sworn foe to Jef- 
frey, reviews his quarrel, alludes to his Lordship's being 
on his travels, and speculates on " what will be the issue 
of a challenge so unequivocally invited," when the defiant 
young bard comes back. Though it disapproves of the 
scurrility, it admits the " bold, honest and manly indigna- 
tion " and discovers " in the youthful countenance of the 

1 "O had my fate been joined with thine," and " Lachin y gair." 

2 Many reviews of Byron were copied bodily from English periodicals. 



The Beginnings. 23 

poet the large temporal vein of genius." Very high praise 
is given to Byron, both as a man and a poet, for the now 
famous passage on Henry Kirk White, which is reprinted 
in full. This coming so early is noteworthy : it marks 
right at the beginning of his career an interest in his per- 
sonality and affairs 1 and a genuine appreciation of his per- 
formance. We may turn over some subsequent volumes 
of the Portfolio. In the number for February, 18 13, 
Childe Harold is briefly noticed (one page). In view of 
the above citation it does not surprise us to read : — " Lord 
Byron was, before he left England, unquestionably in the 
very first class of British poets of the present day, and 
Childe Harold will not only sustain but increase his rep- 
utation." But from this it may not be unjust to infer that 
the poem did not take America so immediately by storm 
as it did London. Goodrich finds the reason in Byron's 
being a lord and a man of fashion, for here, says the 
good democrat, "these adventitious attributes were less 
readily felt and therefore the reception of the new poem 
was more hesitating and distrustful." 2 The Portfolio of 
December, 1813, and January, 1814, transcribes the whole 
of The Giaour. The number for July, 1814, reviewing 
The Corsair, remarks, " The most fashionable writer now 
in England — and the fashion there is always sure to be 
the fashion here — is Lord Byron." Then, "Mercy on 
us what an amateur in robbing and throat cutting this 
young nobleman must be." The critic does not take it 

1 How minute this grew we see from the Portfolio, May, 1819. A "Literary Note" 
says : — "The Liverpool Messenger announces that a new poem from the pen of Lord Byron 
has been sent to England, but the title or subject it has not been able to ascertain." A 
word under " Latest from Europe," in the New England Palladium for April 16, 1824, 
says : — " Lord Byron has subscribed $45,000 to Greek loan fund." This is especially sig- 
nificant, for communication with Europe was then very irregular and only the most im- 
portant events were chronicled. " The new poem " must have been the first two cantos of 
Don Juan, finished Jan. 20, of that year. 

- Recollections, vol. ii., p. 100. 



24 Byron and Byronism in America. 

seriously : " it is written ad ca^ptandiim volgus" and Lara 
he burlesques condescendingly in his prose critique by 
dashes, ejaculations and incoherence. Coming down to 
October, 1822, we observe a different tone ; 1 of certain 
" Lines to my Daughter," we are told that they are 
"wholly free from that daring wickedness and loathsome 
licentiousness which distinguishes the head of the Satanic 
School," and one does not wonder, for they are spurious. 2 
Byron's dramas received less critical attention ; 3 Don 
Juan is first criticised in 1823 4 as "a terrible poem for 
youthful readers," the work of a " titled profligate" and 
" licentious bard." The " sneers at that character on 
which in the female sex the happiness of life depends, a 
virtuous and modest woman," are dreadful; and "how 
could anyone impiously write and print two such lines as 
these : — 

' 'T is strange the Hebrew noun which means I am 
The English always use to govern damn ? '" 5 

Consistency was a jewel not always worn by Byron's 
American critics. 6 The reviewer prognosticates in con- 

1 The editorship had meanwhile changed hands and Byron had begun on Don Juan. 

2 " How many insipid, gross and pitiful productions have been read and admired, 
quoted and lauded by our sagacious and discriminating wits, merely because the title page 
supposed them to be from the pen of ' my Lord Byron.' " — Preface to American Bards 
(a satire) by G. H. Worth, 1819. The place of publication is not given, but as a contem- 
porary newspaper critic of Boston advised the author to " keep his poetry on the other side 
of the Delaware" we may infer it was old Philadelphia. In England the only poem of 
merit ever fathered on Byron was Wolfe's " Sir Charles Moore." 

- 1 e. g. Sardanapalus, Dec. 22, 1822. 

4 But for March, 1822, parallel passages from Don Juan, the shipwreck (ii., 27ff ), and 
from its source Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea had been given in full to indict Byron of 
plagiarism. 

5 i. 14. 

The American Monthly Magazine and Review i., 442 (New York, Oct., 1817), dis- 
cussing The Lament of Tasso, makes use of such terms as gross, despicable, base, heinous, 
condemns it as worthless and — prints it in full, cf. Cairns, p. 16. (Cairns observes that this 
magazine was anti-English, and that the tone of American criticism toward Byron was de- 
termined largely by the editor's attitude toward England and English writers.) A maga- 
zine for ladies, The Literary Cabinet iv. , 25, (New York, 1821), in reviewing Marino 
Faliero, calls Byron " that great poet whose writings have given such a high character to 
the genius of the age," this, too, after Don Juan had been so long shocking the ladies. 



The Beginnings. 25 

elusion, like Southey, " the most dreadful but yet una- 
vailing torments of his death-bed." But in 1825 the 
editor finds space for a letter defending Byron's character, 
urging us to be grateful for " his frequent and eloquent 
reflections on America," 1 and other notices were not al- 
ways so harsh. 2 The North American Review* thought 
Childe Harold and Don Juan " masterpieces respectively 
in the serious and comic order." 

Excerpts from Byron filled the literary corners of the 
newspapers for a generation. Bits of Childe Harold fol- 
low directly in the year of its publication ; the same holds 
for his other poems, though much less for the dramas. 
The minor poems were very popular, even those now little 
read ; 4 but one wonders that so much is what time has 
since proved his best. Noticeable, however, are the in- 
frequent excerpts from Don Juan; they are, generally, 
strictly poetical, 5 or such as contain friendly references 
to America and Washington. 

Though contemporary poets were often extensively crit- 
icised and quoted, Byron's name is by far the most 
ubiquitous in all the newspapers and magazines exam- 
ined, and it maybe assumed that the points of view varied, 
much as in England, and were often subservient to Eng- 
land. 

A curious side-light on Byron's early popularity is cast 
by the booksellers' announcements. One instance must 
suffice. The Spy, a weekly of the then provincial town 

1 e.g. Age of Bronze, v. and vii. ; "Ode to Venice;" Childe Harold iv., 96; 
" Ode to Napoleon." 

2 Cf. The Western Review (Lexington, Kentucky), vol. ii., 6, 1820 ; and the Cincin- 
nati Literary Gazette for 1825. 

3 Byron's Poems, A. C Everett, vol. xx., p. 1-47. 

4 As the "Stanzas to Cadiz," the epitaph on his Newfoundland dog and the epigram 
on the sixth anniversary of his wedding. Cf. the uncollected verses of Kipling that were 
so numerous in the year of fame '98. 

5 As "An infant when it gazes on the light," " 'Tis Sweet," and "Ave Maria." 



26 Byron and Byronism in America. 

of Worcester, Mass., carried the advertisements of one 
George A. Trumbull. In 1812 he caused to be announced 
"Rokeby, by Walter Scott, $1.00;" " Childe Harold's 
Pilgrimage and Other Poems, by Lord Byron, 75c. ; " 
"The Corsair, from the fifth London Edition," is an- 
nounced in large type as a specialty in the issue of July 
20, 1814; others follow in due season. All were, of 
course, American reprints. This Trumbull had also for 
sale " Bottles of Volatile Aromatick and Head Ache Snuff, 
accompanied by Dr. Waterhouse's certificate." Such were 
our venders of poetry and culture. 

To leave the critic with his pen, the editor with his 
shears, and the bookseller with his bottles, the public's 
views and feelings may be guessed at from the many 
poetical addresses to his Lordship, and from the ever 
swelling flood of Byronic verse. As to the former. 

In the New England Palladium (Boston) for October 
6, 1815, one discovers "Lines suggested by the closing 
stanzas of Byron's Childe Harold.'''' Byron is addressed 
as " sweetest bard," "latest of bards," and praised for his 
singing of Greece and Athens. Most to the purpose, how- 
ever, is this : — 

"For to weep with thy grief, and to smile with thy joy — 
To follow thy thoughts thro the mind's darkest storm, 
Bespeaks not a spirit of earthly alloy, 
But a soul that was cast in a heavenly form." 

Thus self-conscious versifiasters laid the flattering unction 
to their souls, and thus the pose, the fad, began. The 
Worcester Sj>y for July 27, 18 14, contains an " Epistle to 
Lord Byron," nearly a column long. It opens : — 

"Hail moody chief of pirate song;" 



The Beginnings. 27 

And then reviews his career : — 



Lo, 



" We saw when thou thy vengeance hurled 
On Jeffrey and his lawless clan 
Which changed the ' minor ' J to the ' man ' " — 

" Thine is the path where danger lurks 
Mongst ruthless Giaours and pagan Turks 

% % % 'H; % % 

Thou, like thy Corsair, 2 bold and free, 
Delight'st the thunder cliffs to ride " — 

yet it laments that his heroes are 

" such a savage band 
With each a war knife in his hand " — 

And alas ! 

"the fair thy tales delight 3 
And beg your Lordship still to write." 

It concludes admonishingly : — 

" O Byron, let not love of fame 
Extinguish virtue's brighter flame ; 
Who thus can lead our minds away 
Should ne'er to doubtful paths betray, 
But still unchanging keep in view 
Their pleasure and their safety too.'' 

The author of this Horatian precept of utile dulci seems 
to have had a presentiment of Don Juan. The Portfolio 
for December, 1817, yields another "Epistle to Lord 
Byron ; " it attacks him in two columns of fine print for 
making poetry and capital out of his woes, just as 

" the mendicant protrudes to sight 
His mangled limbs our pity to excite." 

1 A recondite allusion to the title page of the Hours of Idleness and to the com- 
ments thereon in the Edinburgh Review. 

2 The Corsair had just been put on sale in Worcester. 

3 Cf. "Every puling miss thy story greets," "Address" in the Portfolio, quoted 
below. 



28 Byron and Byronism in America. 

and for cynicism and libertinism. It, too, concludes ad- 
monishingly, or rather beseechingly : — 

"Misguided spirit! yet in mercy spare, 
And if thy heart be human, O forbear ! " 

Byron's melancholy and perversity were considered dis- 
tinguishing traits. 1 No English poet received so many 
epistles from across the sea, except, possibly, Mrs. Felicia 
Hemans, who came nearest to rivaling his Lordship in 
popularity, judging by the press, from about the year 
1826. 2 The odes and elegies called forth by his death 
will be mentioned below. 

The imitations were sometimes serious parodies, as one 
in the Palladium, July 9, 1816, in answer to "the ques- 
tionable spirit which pervades the too popular ' Fare Thee 
Well,"' where Lady Byron sobs : — 

" Now each tie of love is broken " — 

an American defence which culminated later in Mrs. 
Stowe; 3 or sometimes burlesques, as one in the Galaxy, 
January 26, 1826 — 

"There was a sound of rioting by night" — 

where some local Boston escapade supplants Waterloo. 
But they were oftener "in the manner of Lord Byron," 
as the subtitles occasionally read. Lyrics predominate, 
and all, save those to which Moore or Campbell are also 

1 Cf. " Black wormwood bitters Lord Byron should bear," in the " Croaker " Poems, 
(1819). 

2 The first American Edition of Mrs. Hemans was prepared by Andrews Norton, 
and published in 1826. 

3 In 1869, in the Atlantic Monthly ; there had been in the same magazine eight years 
before a sensible defense of Lady Byron by Harriet Martineau. 



The Beginnings. 29 

party, ring the changes on love and despair. Indeed, 
about 1815, newspaper verse grows decidedly more melan- 
choly; verses "On a Chilling Thought" after Byron's 
"To Inez," on " Grief" in Spenserians, on "The Scenes 
of my Youth "by " Philander " (where we have Byron and 
the Delia Cruscans) from the Palladium for 18 15 show a 
marked contrast to the eighteenth century verse that still 
sometimes accompanies them. The new verse makes, 
too, more of an attempt at directness and passion, though 
universally ridiculous : — 

" And is the love of one whole year 
So sudden and forever gone — 
O then farewell to me still dear, 
Still dear to me art thou alone." 

In 1829, in the Essex County Gazette, one may read 
of the 

" Girl of the dark and kindling eye ! 

* * * * * * » 

who suggests 

" The funeral touches of decay," 

which suggest, in turn 

" The pure and blessed light of heaven." 

The piece is signed J. G. W., and is one of many, as yet 
uncollected, 1 Byronic lyrics of the Quaker Poet. Whit- 
tier's early verses were frequently copied in other papers. 
He was one of the most popular of the Byronic American 
bards, but Byronism was, as his latest biographer 2 has 
said, "completely foreign to the quietism of his early 
training and of his later feelings," and seems to have been 
due " to the disturbing stimulus of the new and larger world 

1 But see Cheever's Commonplace Book of American Poetry. 

2 George R. Carpenter, in American Men of Letters Series, Boston, 1903. 



30 Byron and Byronism in America. 

to which he was yet imperfectly adjusted." It forms but a 
very minor phase of Whittier's literary history. 1 

The Byronic weariness of life was widely cultivated ; it 
bespoke, presumably, even more than love's delirium " a 
spirit not of earthly alloy," it had an air of something deep 
about it, something, too, that set the author apart from 
his happy-go-lucky fellows. So sings a youth for the 
Charleston Courier, in 1825 : — 

" At nineteen, life began to pall — 
With love and beauty I had done, 
Ambition, too, began to fall 

From its high hopes of twenty-one." 

Byron had said in the Hours of Idleness : — 



" Weary of love, of life, devoured with spleen 
I rest a perfect Timon, not nineteen." 

The reader shall be troubled further with but the one fol- 
lowing stanza ; the remaining he can find by turning to 

1 For his other early Byronic verse, cf. Mogg Megone (commenced 1830). Whittier 
said later, " It suggests the idea of a big Indian in his war-paint strutting about in Sir Walter 
Scott's plaid." It suggests just as surely the Byronic hero and melodrama and rhetoric, e.g., 

" He starts — there 's a rustle among the leaves : 
Another — the click of his gun is heard ! 
A footstep, — is it the step of Cleaves, 
With Indian blood on his English sword? " 
or : — 

"And how, upon that nameless woe, 
Quick as the pulse can come and go, 
While shakes the unsteadfast knee, and yet 
The bosom heaves — the eye is wet — 
Has thy dark spirit power to stay 
The heart's wild current on its way? " 

In the appendix to the Cambridge Edition are some Spenserians on "Benevolence." 
Byronic in laudation of freedom and in ottava rima is " To a Poetical Trio in the city of 
Gotham " (1832), mingling jest and earnest ; the latter dominates, it being Whittier. Cf. 
Carpenter's Life, p. 94ff. 



The Beginnings. 31 

the New England Palladium for Tuesday, December 2, 

1821 : — 

"Nay sigh not — 'tis useless — I could sigh too 
If I knew any service that sighing might do. 
Nay sigh not — 'tis better to smile if we may 
And thus of our pilgrimage cheat the long day. 
We must on, be our path over flower or thorn, 
Do thunder clouds gloom it, or sunbeams adorn, 
We must on — and it leads us all to one spot 
Where our pleasures, our sorrows alike are forgot." 

The Hebrew Melodies set country parsons early at work 
on '■'■The Destruction of Sodom" ii JaeV and the like. 

The tales were imitated in such papers as gave a column 
or two to the local poets. A youth in the Vermont Mes- 
senger for 1822 depicted in two and one-half columns " The 
Pirate" arousing our curiosity and fear quite at the begin- 
ning with 

" Why is that form of secret woe ? " — 

Byron had penetrated to the Green Mountains. The 
Galaxy for 1837 has two columns of octosyllabic and pen- 
tameter couplets on (i The Pirate Barque " — 

"A tale of horror and despair" — 

to quote the concluding line. For the same year it prints 
also "The Idiot Son " in the style of Mazefifia, and "The 
Lovers of Scio " in that of The Corsair with Byronic 
names, " Leila" and " Haja." It is only by going beyond 
the beginnings that the tales meet us very frequently in 
the papers. The lyrics on the other hand decline. 

Childe Harold appears in the Galaxy for 1820 in five 
Spenserian stanzas, labelled " Childe Harold in Boeotia," 
with echoes of the second canto ; The Rev. T. H. Clinch 
has several on " Music " in echo of the fourth. Don Juan 
is reflected curiously in the Galaxy for 1826 (and fre- 



32 Byron and Byronism in America. 

quently elsewhere) as a " Carriers' Address," containing 
allusions to contemporary events. But neither of these 
longer poems was so often imitated in the papers. 

Byronic echoes are audible in the many verses on 
Modern Greece, in whose struggle America is known to 
have taken a lively interest, in odes to Napoleon, in those 
verses, of course, addressed to Byron, and in the odes to 
Lafavette in 1824, who for a few weeks seems to have 
put all other themes at a discount. 

Then Lord Byron died at Missolonghi. In England it 
was as if the sun had gone out, and Carlyle wrung his 
hands, and the boy Tennyson walked into the yard to 
trace with a stick in the sand, " Byron is dead." The 
English and Continental press made him the subject of 
the hour, and published countless worthless monodies in 
his honor. Equally great was the shock in America, 
and equally countless and more worthless the monodies. 
Though some papers, devoted exclusively to news, merely 
mention him under the nonpareil column of " Latest from 
Europe," 1 and many others content themselves with long 
transcerpts of English critiques and verses, 2 an equal num- 
ber contain much and original matter. One has but to 
turn to our files for 1832 or 1850, the years of Scott's and 
of Wordsworth's passing, to see how very unusual was 
this homage of attention to a great English man of letters. 
The North American Review begins a fifty-page review 3 

1 e. g. " By the ship Euphrates at N. Y., from Liverpool, papers to May 25 have been 
received Lord Byron died at Missolonghi, April 19, of a rheumatic fever, 

. . [a few biographical facts here] . . His last thoughts were of his wife, child and 
sister. His Lordship was in his 37th year and is succeeded in his title by Capt. Byron of 
the navy." 

2 Cf. The Galaxy , July 2, 1824 : — " The English papers contain a great number of 
notices of this nobleman's life, character and works, from which we have extracted the fol- 
lowing ; " here follows a column of biography and criticism. 

3 By A. C Everett. The North American Review has in succeeding volumes many 
articles on Byron, cf. Index to North American Review 1815-1877 by William Cushing, 
Cambridge, 1878. The earlier volumes (vol. i., 1815,) often reprinted passages of his 
poetry. Cf. esp. vol. iv., 369-377, selections from Childe Harold, iii. 



The Beginnings. 33 

of Lord Byron's poems: — "The death of Lord Byron, 
without depressing the price of stocks or affecting the elec- 
tion of President, has produced a deep and general feeling 
of regret throughout the country." Most articles and notices, 
however, refer more to his life, especially in the Greek war, 
than to his poetry. That he was a nobleman, an Anglo- 
Greek Washington and a poet to boot, seem to have been 
for the moment uppermost in the public mind. The 
funeral criticism on his poetry, though often extravagant 
either in blame or in praise, sometimes surprises us by its 
soundness. " In depth of thought, in power, in brilliancy 
and felicity of style, in his almost miraculous facility of 

production, he stood without a rival in our day 

He has two defects, extravagance of thought and lan- 
guage, and want of care and finish in the versification. 
Childe Harold is the poem on which his fame 
will ultimately rest .... the moral defects of 

Bcj>j>o and Don Juan are to be regretted The 

general effect of his writings is immoral," are character- 
istic bits from Everett's review. 

Of home-made monodies let the following selections 
suffice. In the Galaxy, July 16, 1824, Byron is praised 
for his poetry, reference being all to the third canto of 
Childe Harold as "ye mountains of Jura" and "thou, 
Lake Leman" — but what touched the writer was that 



"Though far from his home and his country he died, 
Yet the loud voice of freedom has hallowed his tomb ; ' 



it concludes : 



"He has left a bright name that no refluent tide 
Can sweep from the earth till the day of its doom." 



34 Byron and Byronism in America. 

The same paper for August 6, 1824, prints " An Ode to 
Lord Byron," which is one long painful column of stan- 
zas supposed to be modelled on those of the "Ode to 
Napoleon," all in praise and sorrow. It has for February 
26, 1826, another by the Rev. C. C. Colton, also after 
the "Ode to Napoleon." He "prizes," " mourns " and 
" blames" the poet, and shows an astonishing familiarity 
with his work, a familiarity which seems to have been 
but too characteristic of those who were trying to climb 
Mount Parnassus with one foot and Mount Zion with the 
other. 1 

If one institute for comparison's sake a brief examination 
of the newspapers from 1824 down to i860, one will find 
Byron gradually losing ground. To judge from the 
Boston Recorder and a few others for 1845-6-7, he has 
fallen off very much — while excerpts and imitations of 
Felicia Hemans, pious temperance lyrics from the work- 
shop of the once honored Rev. W. B. Tappan, and senti- 
mental musings of Mrs. Sigourney, with anti-slavery 
verse signed J. G. W., are numerous. About the same 
period Thackeray's " Ballad of Bouillabaisse," Browning's 
" How they Brought the Good News," parodies of Hia- 
watha, here and there a bit from Tennyson, all in the 
Boston Post, suggest, too, the passing of Mrs. He- 
mans. 



1 Cairns observes, " The remarks on his death from the pulpit are an interesting study." 
He was reviled as seducer of women, and blasphemer against the Most High ; his end was 
dwelt on with pity and relish, while good Dr. Lyman Beecher generously lamented that 
Byron had not come under his own particular care and thereby received peace and the hope 
of salvation. For a generation thereafter Byron figured prominently in clerical " Lectures 
to Young Men," as atheist, libertine and inebriate. Undoubtedly the pulpit did only less 
than the press to spread information about Byron and to stimulate the reading of his poetry. 
Cf. "One reason, beyond question, which contributed to make the works of Lord Byron so 
popular, was the overcharged denunciations which were at first rung against them." — 
Western Monthly Review, Cincinnati, vol. iii, p. 648, 1829. 

The more dignified journals of the religious press contained but brief obituary notices. 



The Beginnings. 35 

Of magazine articles it may be mentioned that Shelley, 1 
Wordsworth 2 and Keats, 3 seem to have claimed more and 
more attention. Of magazine poetry little has been said, 
since the bulk of it was republished in book form, and 
must now be looked to ; for the more ambitious were not 
content with the Poet's Corner. 

1 Shelley's name appears early, linked with Byron's, as anathema. Little seems to 
have been known of his poetry before the Philadelphia reprint of Galignani's Edition of 
Keats, Shelley and Coleridge, in one large volume. See The Poe-Chivers Papers by 
Prof. Woodberry in the Century, 1902-3. 

2 Wordsworth had had from the beginning, besides Bryant, "supporters two or three." 
Longfellow noted in the article before quoted "how inevitably those who have imitated 
him have fallen into his tedious mannerisms." See "The Lynn Bard," Alonzo Lewis 
{Poems, Boston, 1831). 

8 The New York Mirror for Aug. 22, 1829, quoting from the Boston Mercury a short 
article on Keats, remarks, " As yet only a small portion of the public is acquainted with 
his writings." 



CHAPTER III. 

BYRON'S LITERARY INFLUENCE, 1815-1830. 

IT HAS been already remarked that Byron's influence 
on America's greater poets has never been of moment ; 
Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Emerson, Whit- 
man, are in one way or another, indeed, distinctly un- 
byronic. 1 Here literary influences are often obviously 
Continental or not contemporary. Longfellow brought us 
the romance and meters from the North and South of 
Europe ; Lowell was a combination of shrewd Yankee, 
classical scholar, critic, statesman and professor, in whose 
poetry one may sometimes trace Keats ; 2 Emerson's poetry 
is in thought reminiscent of post-Kantian philosophy, in 
style often of the later Elizabethans ; Holmes had some- 
what of the French spirit, partially temperamental, par- 
tially developed or acquired during his early years of 
study in Paris ; he also combined the English literary 
traditions of the eighteenth century in his wit, didacticism, 
urbanity and balanced heroics ; Whittier in manhood spoke 
his own language, though, as reformer, he had the invec- 
tive and indignation of the Hebrew prophets, and, as artist, 
he sometimes took hints from Byrant, Longfellow, and 
later even from Browning and Tennyson ; Whitman's ante- 
cedents are still in doubt. Poe and Bryant will be men- 
tioned later. 

1 Whitman had even more of egotism than Byron, but he made it a philosophic prin- 
ciple : "What I shall assume, you shall assume" (Leaves of Grass); while Byron stood 
"among them, but not of them" — the very reverse attitude. 

2 Lowell's early poems show his reading in Tennyson, Shelley and Landor. His ode 
to France is after Coleridge. 



Byron's Literary Influence, iSij-i8jo. 37 

But there is a group of men, often not without ability, 
whose verse, once widely read and admired, has much of 
Byron's spirit and technique. Though imitators, many of 
them by a slight infusion of personality and imagination, 
and by relatively skilful handling of the poems imitated, 
may still command some respect, and are still not altogether 
forgotten. All may be considered as belonging to Ameri- 
can Literature, if we use the magnified scale adopted by 
Professor Trent. These it seems best to look at together, 
before turning to the huge mass of absolutely forgotten 
and poetically worthless exploits in Byronic poetastry, from 
which, however, we are likely to gain our chief knowl- 
edge of the kind, the extent and the causes of Byronism 
in America. The latter may be treated primarily with 
reference to facts and principles illustrated. For the 
former a chronological presentation seems most feasible. 

Names may be grouped either side of the year 1830. 
The best work of our earlier poets, of Halleck, Drake, Dana, 
Bryant, was then done ; l the later poets were just beginning 
to be heard. Several things by Longfellow appeared in 
Poems Selected from the United States Literary Gazette, 
as early as 1826. His first book, albeit an elementary 
French grammar, bears date of 1830. Attention has 
already been called to Whittier's early newspaper verse. 
In 1827, '29 and '31, Poe published his earlier poems. 
Moreover, 1827, '30, '32 mark the years of Tennyson's 
first volumes, and the rise of a new poetry in England, 
which was soon to affect America. By 1830, too, our 
social conditions had begun to approach those we know 
to-day. New England changed from an agricultural and 

1 Contemporaries seem to have felt the end of a poetic period about this time. The 
Knickerbocker Magazine for November, 1838, says tragically: "Our poets one by one 
have passed away. Halleck, Percival, Bryant and Dana, where are they?" Note, inci- 
dentally, that Kettel's three volumes of American verse were published in 1829. 



38 Byron and Byronism in America. 

sea-faring to an industrial people, the movement West was 
beginning, and the hustling American, satirized in Martin 
Chuzzlcwit, reached a useful maturity. Railroads and 
telegraphs followed. 1 In 1830 we had but eight hundred 
and thirty-two newspapers, in number not double that of 
the German-American newspapers to-day, while the next 
decade brought the rise of modern journalism. The New 
York Herald was founded in 1835, the Tribune in 1841, 
and in 1850 there were two thousand five hundred and 
twenty-six newspapers, in i860 four thousand and fifty- 
one. 2 The systematic effort to spread the good, the true 
and the beautiful, as witnessed, respectively, in societies 
for various reforms, in library, college and lecture founda- 
tions and learned associations, and in art museums and acad- 
emies, comes more and more into intelligent and zealous 
hands. Before 1830 existed, indeed, the Massachusetts 
Temperance Society, the American Tract, Bible and 
Peace Societies, the Boston Atheneum had been founded 
in 1806, the American Educational Society in 1815, the 
Mercantile Libraries of Boston and New York in 1820, to be 
followed by that of Philadelphia in 1823, and the National 
Academy of Design in 1826 ; but the anti-slavery Society 
(1831) and Transcendentalism {The Dial, 1840-44), such 
foundations for the advancement of learning and the dis- 
semination of culture as the Boston Academy of Music 
(1833), the Lowell Lectures (1839), the Smithsonian In- 
stitute (1846), the American Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science (1847), the Astor and the Boston Public 
Libraries (both 1854), andthe Agassiz Museum at Harvard 
(1859), with the public art galleries and the rise of church 
architecture 3 belong in the succeeding period, and mark 

1 The Baltimore & Ohio R.R. was begun in 1828 ; The Morse telegraph, 1844. 

2 See Hudson's History of Journalism and Whitcomb's Chronological Outlines. 

3 Trinity Church, designed by Upjohn, and Grace Church, by Renwick, were erected 
in the early forties. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1815—1830. 39 

a more thorough-going, more independent life of the spirit. 
Our long apprenticeship to the learning and art of' other 
lands was drawing to a close. 1 Byronism in America, 
almost always in its best estate somewhat shallow, found 
its disciples more and more exclusively among the minor 
literati. 

1815-1830. 
Among New York authors in the early days was Gulian 
C.Verplanck, remembered as an editor of Shakespere. 2 In 
18 19 he published The State Triumvirate, a Political Tale, 
and The Epistles of Brevet Major, Pindar Puff. The 
Talc is in octosyllabics, The Epistles are in heroics, and 
the critical apparatus is after Mar tinus Scriblerus. Thus, 
it is interesting as being transitional. The new literature is 
criticised in the form of the old. Prudence is called upon to 
" rescue from poetic fever 

The madcTning bard that voice defies 
Or rends, like Byron, all the ties 
That Faith or Reason form " — 

but in an " Appendix" we are furnished with a bogus ex- 
tract of nine stanzas from the fourth canto of Don Juan, 
which in reality had not yet appeared. It deals with New 
York politics and society. 

But Fitz-Green Halleck is a more important name. In 
this same year, when he and Drake were sending their 
" Croaker" poems to the New York Evening Post, was 
printed the first edition of Fanny. Few nowadays read 
Fanny, but any one will recall Lowell's characterization, 

" a pseudo Don Juan 
With the wickedness out that gave salt to the true one." 3 

But this is a little misleading, as Beppo furnished the 

1 Emerson, The American Scholar, 1837. 

2 He is generally called the first American editor, but this honor belongs to Dennie. 

3 The Fablekfor Critics, 1848. 



40 Byron and Byronism in America. 

original impulse. 1 " It was so popular that the publisher 

gave him $500.00 to add fifty stanzas to the new edition " 2 

(1821). A social satire on a flashy New Yorker and his 

fashionable daughter, with digressions innumerable on 

Greece, European politics, bad literature and bad statues, 

and civic life 

" from Clinton down to the bill-sticker 
Of a ward-meeting " — 

with quizzical remarks on a lady's age, with whimsical 
rhymes and clever anti-climax, and quite gentlemanly 
ease, it is the first and the best of the sort in America. 
For the crim-cons of Don Juan is substituted a financial fail- 
ure, while the wickedness is suggested by occasional stan- 
zas consisting simply of asterisks. 3 Bits of serious poetry 
are interspersed, as the stanzas on Weehawken, 4 with By- 
ronic echoes of " forest solitudes" and " crags," and of 

" the moan 
Of wearied ocean when the storm is gone." 

But the songs recall Moore. Let cxxi serve as a speci- 
men. The ottava rima has been docked to six lines : — 

"In all the modern languages she was 
Exceedingly well versed, and had devoted 
To their attainment, far more time than has 
By the best teachers lately been allotted: 
For she had taken lessons, twice a week 
For a full month in each, and she could speak, 

French and Italian," 5 etc. 

1 Frederick S. Cossens, in A Memorial of Fitz-Green Halleck 08G8) states : " Halleck 
told me that Fanny was published before Don Juan had crossed the Atlantic, and that 
he had adopted the versification of Beppo. one of Byron's minor poems." General J.G. 
Wilson, Halleck's friend and biographer, made a similar statement to the present 
writer. But see infra. 

2 The New York Tribune, May 15, 1877. 

3 Some older expurgations from Don Juan strike one as peculiar. Halleck's edition 
prints the worst things in full, but eliminates, e.g., i. 131, on the pox, and xi, 57 and 
58, which contain mere jesting on the Rev. Rowley Powley and Pegasus' "psalmodic 
amble." 

4 Stanzas 94-99. 

'"' This reminds one very much of the description of the Lady Inez, Don Juan, i, 13 and 
14, but it is in the earlier (1819) edition . Another passage suggests the favorite " 'T is sweet. " 
These can hardly be coincidences ; Halleck's memory may have failed him and Don Juan 
may have come into his hands during the progress of the poem, though, as he said, Beppo 
set him at it. Fanny was published in December. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1815-18JO. 41 

Fanny is, however, not written in the tone of Don Juan. 
" Halleck was never cynical in his satire, and Byron always 
was," said Bryant; 1 and Bayard Taylor 2 called him "The 
brave, bright and beautiful growth of a healthy masculine 
race," adding "The cries and protests, the utterance of 
' world-pain,' with which so many of his contemporaries in 
Europe filled the world, awoke no echo in his sound and 
sturdy nature." 

In certain Spenserians on " Wyoming " both Campbell 
and Byron are traceable in stanza and phraseology, while 
the subject itself had been sung by Campbell, to whose 
poem thankful reference was then frequent in America. 
"Marco Bozzaris " reminds one of Byron by enthusiasm 
for Greek freedom, and of Campbell in martial vigor, while 
its octosyllabics are echoes of Scott. There is Byron in 
eleven ottava rimas on " Connecticut." Here, too, as also 
in Alnwick Castle, grave and gay are whimsically mixed, 
after Byron's later manner. In "The Recorder" is a 
joke direct out of The Vision of Judgment \ z — 

" I take the liberty of asking 
Permission, Sir, to write your life 
With all its scenes of calm and strife, 

******* 

A poem in a quarto volume." 

The New York Tribune once observed, 4 " Halleck was 
of the school of Scott, Campbell and Moore, and its only 
American representative ; " Byron's name must have been 
implied, or its omission was a curious oversight. Yet we 
feel original force in Halleck, differing rather in degree 

1 In Some Notice of the Life and Writings of Fitz-Green Halleck, read before the 
New York Historical Society, 1869. 

2 In an Address for the formal dedication of the Halleck monument at Guilford, 
Conn., July 8, 1869, printed by Amermann, Wilson, N.Y., 1877. 

3 Stanza 99. 

* In the article of May 15, 1877. 



42 Byron and Byronism in America. 

than in kind from Byron's force, which raises him above 
mere imitators. The critic 1 who claimed for him the en- 
ergy "to seize the passing moment, the present scene, the 
grand event, and make them subservient to use," hit unwit- 
tingly on Matthew Arnold's analysis of Byron's peculiar 
genius. 2 Halleck in remarking he felt that he had "lost 
on Byron's death a brother," and in long enthusiastic labors 
at editing the first worthy edition of his poetry and prose, 
may have been prompted by an intuition of kinship. Con- 
temporaries observed it, 3 at least, and one declared Halleck 
to be " what Byron might have been had he been born a 
Connecticut Yankee," 4 with an implication of a certain in- 
tellectual strength and shrewdness common to both. Still 
it will not do to call Halleck " the American Byron." 

His friend Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820) left 
little beside The Culfrit Fay and "The American Flag." 
Some Spenserians lamenting the dearth of American sing- 
ers on American subjects, and advising Halleck as a patri- 
otic exercise, 

" To climb the palisado's lofty brow," 

are in the rhetorical vein of the stanzas on Greece in 
Childe Harold. A fragment, "Leon," in heroics, was 
inspired by The Corsair. 

William Cullen Bryant used to be called "the American 
Wordsworth " until it was protested that this 

" was endangering the life of your client 
By attempting to stretch him up into a giant." 

We have Bryant's own testimony on the effect first ac- 

1 William Allen Butler, in his Central Park Address, May 15, 1877, on the unveiling 
of Halleck's statue. 

*' In the preface to Selections from Byron. 

3 " We mark in Halleck the Byronic spirit and fire of song." American Poets and 
their Critics in the Knickerbocker Magazine, vol. iii. June, 1834. 

4 An anonymous American (N.P. Willis?) writing on American Literature in the 
London Athenmim, 1835. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1815-1830. 43 

quaintance with the Lyrical Ballads 1 made upon him. 
But in his historical poem, " The Ages," he is as much 
influenced by Ityron. "The Ages" (1821), in thirty-five 
Spenserians, is Bryant's longest poem. It is a review 
writ large of the progress of man. The roll of the verses 
suggests the first two cantos of Childe Harold, as also the 
thought and subject matter : — 

"Virtue cannot dwell with slaves, nor reign 
O'er those who cower to take the tyrant's yoke." 

He describes where 

" the abbey lay 
Sheltering dark orgies it were shame to tell." 2 

He sings Greece as often elsewhere : 8 — 

" Yet there was that within thee which has saved 
Thy glory and redeemed thy blotted name." 4 

The grand in the moral world, which embraces history, 
has always made a strong appeal to the American mind. 
Of Byron's greater elements something of his historical 
mood seems to have made the deepest impression. But 
compared to Byron at his best in the fourth canto of Childe 
Harold, Bryant is felt to be describing history, without 
penetrating into its inner spirit and without reaching 
finality of expression. 

Bryant's one other Byronic poem begins : — 

"I sat beside the glowing grate, fresh heaped 
With Newport coal, and as the flame grew bright 
The many colored flame — and played and leaped 
I thought of rainbows and the northern light, 
Moore's Lalla Rookh, the Treasury Report 
And other brilliant matters of the sort." 

1 The Philadelphia reprint came out in 1802. 

2 Cf. Childe Harold. 

3 Especially with reference to the Greek war for independence. 

4 This is, moreover, one of those Byronic echoes which are so frequent in our early 
verse; a moment and we recall Byron's 

" But there is that within me which shall tire " — Childe Harold, iv, 137. 



44 Byron and Byronism in America. 

It has fancy, some quiet descriptions of nature, a very pale 
shimmer of humor, but no cleverness, no wit; and the 
familiarity of Don Juan was too laborious a task for the 
sedate Bryant. A contemporary satire 1 sneers : — 

"And meditations on Rhode Island Coal, 
Display the lofty sphere of Bryant's soul." 

Bryant recalls both Byron and Wordsworth in his love 
of freedom ; his championing of the Greek cause is Byronic 
in spirit, though not in manner ; his reflections on freedom 
have less of Byron's fire, and more of Wordsworth's dig- 
nity and trust. One liberty sonnet on William Tell is a 
curious fusing of Byron's " Bonnivard " and Wordsworth's 
"England and Switzerland," both in thought, situation, 
rhythm and language. In general, Bryant is least Bryant 
where he is most Byron. 

In Bryant's friend, the essayist Richard Henry Dana, 
Sr., the Byronic elements are very different. He is re- 
membered as a poet for The Buccaneer? a pirate tale. 
Its supernatural terror and homely phraseology recall 
Coleridge and Wordsworth. But Mathew Lee, the wicked 
hero — 

" A dark, low, brawny man was he, 
H is law — 'It is my way ' ; 

Beneath his thickset brows a sharp light broke 
From small gray eyes, his laugh a triumph spoke " — 

was cousin-german of him who 

" had a laughing devil in his sneer," 3 

and brother of a dark band of tough and mysterious gentry 

1 Reviewers Reviewed, see chap, iv, infra. 
- Printed with other poems in 1827. 
8 The Corsair, i, 9. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1815—1830. 45 

who once infested the American imagination. Byronic, 
too, are such rhetorical questions as, 

" Whose corpse at morn lies swinging on the sedge ? " — 

with the monitory information : — 

" There 's blood and hair, Matt, on thy axe's edge." 

Still more obviously Byronic are some Spenserians on 
"Daybreak," in the mood of Childe Harold, iii, without 
its mysticism. He is one, he says self-consciously, who 
would prefer to grieve alone, one 

" whom nature taught to sit with her 
On her proud mountains, by her rolling sea — 
Who, when the winds are up, with mighty stir 
Of woods and waters, feel the quickening spur 
To my strong spirit." 

There is "world-pain" and New England puritanism in 
the following : — 

" But wrong, and hate and love and grief and mirth 
Will quicken soon, and hard, hot toil and strife, 
With headlong purpose, shake the sleeping earth 
With discord strange, and all that man calls life. 
With thousand scattered beauties nature's rife, 
And airs and woods, and streams breathe harmonies ; 
Man weds not these, but taketh art to wife ; 
Nor binds his heart with soft and kindly ties: — 
He feverish, blinded lives, and feverish, sated, dies." 1 

1 An aged author and friend, Thomas T. Stone, D.D. (1800-1895), in recalling Byron's 
early vogue, once told me of a conversation with Dana and a mutual friend just after 
Byron's death. As the friend ventured to question Byron's poetical gift, Dana exclaimed 
— "What — 

1 From peak to peak the rattling crags among 
Leaps the live thunder ! ' — 
the man who could do that no poet ! " 



a6 Byron and Byronism in America. 

John G. C. Brainard (1796-1828) is remembered chiefly 
by Whittier's appreciative essay. 1 His small volume (1825) 
contains much that is Byronic. He was fond of the Spen- 
serian stanza. Spenserians had been written in America 
before Childe Harold, but manifestly in imitation of the 
technique and thought of 18th century Spenserians, espec- 
ially of Beattie's. 2 In such as the following from "Jerusa- 
lem " it is no longer Beattie's, it is the stanza in the service 
of eloquence and history ; at least that was the author's 
intent : — 

"Lost Salem of the Jews — great sepulchre 
Of all profane and of all holy things — 
Where Jew and Turk and Gentile yet concur 
To make thee what thou art! thy history brings 
That's mixed of joy and woe — the whole earth rings 
With the sad truth which He has prophesied, 
Who would have sheltered with His holy wings 
Thee and thy children. You His power defied; 
You scourged Him while He lived, and mocked Him as He died." 

There is the Byronic reflection on tyrants in ' ' The Death 
of Alexander of Russia," concluding with a reference to 
Byron's favorite hero, Washington : — 

" But where is he 
Who, pure in life, majestic in his fall, 
Lay down beneath his native cedar tree? 
Potomac's wave, Mount Vernon's grassy pall, 
That wraps his relics round, O ! thou art worth them all." 

He also imitated Don Juan in " New Year's Verses for 
1825." Here, as in much American Don Juan verse, it 
is rather the manner than the spirit which is reproduced. 
They begin : — 

1 Prefixed to the posthumous edition of Brainard's poems, 1832. 

2 As in Dwight's Greenfield Hill. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1815-1830. 47 

" I love the Universal Yankee Nation 
Where'er they are — whate'er they are about, 
Whatever be their wealth, or rank, or station, 
Their character or conduct. They are out 
Upon parole, or suff'rance, or probation, 
On horseback, or on foot — and soon no doubt, 
In coaches, or in Congress! — bless the land, 
It is a thing I cannot understand." 

This suggests Greenville Mellen's Our Chronicle of 
1826} Mellen shortens the ottava rima, and adopts a 
concluding Alexandrine from the Spenserian stanza. He 
proposes, he says, to be 

" Sometimes sad and sometimes sad-satirical." 

And he proceeds to descant on the vanity of human wishes 
and the different activities of men, as war, commerce, the 
Church, the law, and poetry. As to glory, 

"Some seek it, too, in writing poetry — 
Not half so good as this — and Heaven forgive 
If they or anyone should think that I 
Expected on such fame as this to live — 
But so it is — if we can win Parnassus 
We crown ourselves forthwith, to let reviewers lash us." 

This whimsical complacency with one's self seems to have 
been one of the most frequently imitated elements of Don 
Juan. It was doubly alluring to the self-consciousness of 
our amateurs in verse, and every amateur, in verse at 
least, is self-conscious. Mellen's Martyr's Triumph and 
Other Poems, 12 with motto from Man/red, are Byronic. 
The Martyr's Triumph, Spenserians covering fourteen 
pages, is a story of a Christian done to death, told with 
Byronic eloquence and unbyronic orthodoxy. His heroics 

1 Boston, 1827. 

2 Boston, 1833. 



48 Byron and Byronism in America. 

on "The Light of Letters" have a passage to Greece and 
on Byron, beginning : — 

" And he who died for Greece ! what tongue can tell 
How mourned the muses when their Byron fell ? " 

And his ode on Byron, 

" 'T is done, the pilgrimage is o'er, 
And Harold sinks to rest;" 

is that of an ardent admirer. 

Such odes meet us by hundreds in old books, but pre- 
sumably the best and most elaborate thing called forth by 
Byron's death was George Lunt's Grave of Byron} It is 
a restatement of Byron's own feelings and philosophy on 
man, nature, suffering and death as they appear in Childe 
Harold, and in the manner of Childe Harold, with here 
and there some good stanzas ; for Lunt was genuinely in- 
spired by pity and affection for the man, and admiration 
for what was best in his life and works. 2 But some stanzas, 
such as those to ocean, become mere imitations. Byron's 
apostrophe was a favorite theme with paraphrasers. 8 

Another once popular tribute to Byron's memory was 
John Neal's turgid, but often musical, "The Sleeper." 4 
Neal (i 793-1876), one of the most amusing of our early 
breeders of home-culture, was a sort of rough and ready 
" moral Byron." In his incoherent novel Randolph (1823), 
one Edward Morton, an American, is represented as writ- 
ing a series of letters to his friend George Stafford, an 

1 Boston, 1826. 

2 In a note he says, "I have no intention either in the text or anywhere else of en- 
tering into a regular and unqualified defense of Lord Byron's character or writings 

I do think, however, that Lord Byron has been judged in many instances 

harshly, if not unfairly." 

3 See, inter alia, Lunt's "Hampton Beach" in Poems (N.Y.,1839), and "To the 
Sea," by W. G. Simms, in Areytos (Charleston, 1860) ; they contain downright copying. 

4 Reprinted in Kettel, vol. iii, with long selections from Lunt's Grave and from con- 
temporary Byronides, like Carlos Wilcox (also a follower of Cowper), and others for 
whom there is space neither in text nor notes. 



Byron's Literary Influence, i8ij—i8jo. 40 

Englishman, on American life, politics and literature ; and 
of Neal he is made to say (Neal having one eye on Byron, 
the other on himself) : "Talents .... various .... 
contradictory .... capricious." His "own fires .... 
may consume him to ashes" .... and "his whole life 
has been a tissue of wild and beautiful adventures." Neal 
has similar remarks on himself in " American Writers." 1 
In this same novel Morton, as a lad "unaided and alone," 
as a man " proud as Lucifer," w r ho in his mighty suffer- 
ings passed in society for a mystery and a bold, bad man, 
" dangerous to know," 2 is drawn rather more after Byron 
himself than after any one of his heroes. Thoughts and 
phrases, though here in prose, often recall familiar lines. 3 
It is strewn with off-hand judgments on authors, notably 
on Byron, of whom he asserts, " the measure and manner 
is worn out." 4 Far from it. For the model of Neal's 
tragedy Otho, h whose hero was 

" sternly desolate, 

The monarch wanderer of the foaming deep, 
Companion to the spirit of the storm, 
So inaccessible — and so sublime," 

we have but to read a few lines in Manfred? 

1 A series of articles in Blackwood's for 1824. 

2 The words Lady Caroline Lamb wrote in her diary after first meeting Byron. The 
phrases above are Neal's. 

3 Cf. " O woman what art thou made of? so beautiful, yet so deadly " with 

" Alas, the love of woman, it is known 

To be a lovely and a fearful thing ; " 

and " Did you never laugh to keep yourself from crying ? " with 

" If I laugh at any mortal thing 
'T is that I may not weep." 

4 He says the same of Scott. For other criticisms on Byron in Randolph, cf. "Don 
Juan is only a parody upon Childe Harold by the author himself." Its licentiousness is 
made too much of — " Let Don Juan alone and it will be forgotten in another twelfth month " 
. . . . " His Cain, Manfred and ' Ode on Napoleon ' will outlive anything he has written " 
.... "Byron's imagination is neither brilliant nor delicate, but strong as death." 

6 "Otlio was a tragedy written for Cooper in the day of his strength, but never played. 
It was rather too melodramatic." —John Neal, Wandering- Recollections, Boston, 1869. 
On page 194, is his own account of his once famous review of Byron's poems. 

6 The New England Galaxy, Jan. 14, 1820, reviews " The deep terrible agonies and the 
deep sullen emotions of Otho " in the same terms as were current in praising The Corsair, 
Lara or Manfred. 



5<d Byron and Byronism in America. 

Thus, Neal admired and affected Byron's personality 
and his heroes, and was ready with judgments on his 
poetry, as on all else under heaven. But he was too good- 
natured, too shrewd a Yankee, in spite of his blatant ego- 
tism and "wild beautiful adventures," to take either with 
absolute seriousness. Byron's style, however, in its vigor 
and spontaneity, he cultivated with all zeal. He some- 
times has genuine force and rapidity ; take the lines : — 

" 'T is a helmeted band ! from the hills they descend 
Like the monarchs of storm, when the forest trees bend. 
No scimitars swing as they gallop along: 
No clattering hoof falls sudden and strong : 
No trumpet is filled, and no bugle is blown : 
No banners abroad on the wind are thrown .... 

******* 
But they speed like coursers whose hoofs are shod 
With a silent shoe from the loosen'd sod .... 

******* 
Away they have gone ! — and their path is all red 
Hedged in by two lines of the dying and dead" . . . . x 

The whole passage, too long to quote, has, also, a con- 
crete reality, a vividness, not unworthy of Byron ; it is one 
of the few instances of good Byronic poetry, as contrasted 
with self-conscious imitation. However, his Byronic style 
was oftener burlesque exaggeration. Something he names 
"The Conquest of Peru," made up of disjointed phrases, 
set off by long dashes (always Neal's and Byron's favorite 
punctuation), is a series of whoops and yawps, which look 
on the printed page like lines of racing porpoises at sea, 
or horses on a steeple chase. 

Of a different sort was the Byronism of James Gates 

1 The Battle of Niagara and Other Poems, 1818. There is in the volume something of 
Scott; and in the preface to the second edition (Baltimore, 1819) he acknowledged his debt 
especially to Byron, Moore and Leigh Hunt, of whom the last, he said, " has a nicer per- 
ception of propriety in terms, a richer and more captivating simplicity in applying epithets 
than any man that ever breathed." 



Byron's Literary Influence, i8ij-i8jo. 51 

Percival 1 (1795-1856), who combined celibacy with poe- 
try, surgery, geology, chemistry, etymology 2 and mis- 
anthropy. Contemporary notices place him high, naming 
him with Byron for his poetry, temperament, and solitary 
and not uninteresting personality. 3 Lowell, who did for 
Percival's fame 4 somewhat the same service that Macaulay 
did for Robert Montgomery's, found in him early in life 
" a taint of Byronism which indeed does not wholly disap- 
pear to the last ; " whereas, the influence of Moore led to 
" cloying sentimentalism." The Byron in Percival was pri- 
marily the Byron of proud sorrow. Prometheus, " so like 
Byron at his ordinary level that it is hard to tell it apart," 5 
begins : — 

"They talk of love and pleasure, — but 'tis all 
A tale of falsehood. Life is made of gloom, 
The fairest scenes are clad in ruin's pall, 
The loveliest pathway leads but to the tomb ; 
Alas ! destruction is man's only doom. 
We rise and sigh our little lives away, 
A moment blushes beauty's vernal bloom, 
A moment brightens manhood's summer ray, 
Then all is rapt in cold and comfortless decay." 

1 Life and Letters, by Julius H. Ward, 1866. 

2 He spent four years correcting the proofs of Webster's Dictionary. 

3 SeeNeal's Randolph: " Mr. Percival .... addicted grossly to Byron "; and Knapp's 
Sketches of Public Characters (1830) : " His Prometheus is full of deep philosophy and fine 
poetry" .... "His smaller pieces are in every magazine and newspaper in the country" 
.... " His elements are all poetical." 

The London Athenceum for 1835, in articles on American Literature, which were pos- 
sibly written by Willis, says : "The first poet of America by the rule of Horace, poeta 
nascitur non Jit, is James G. Percival," p. 54 ... . ''Percival looks the poet more abso- 
lutely than any man we ever saw ; it is written on his forehead, and steeped in his eye, and 
wound about his lips .... Percival is the most interesting man in America," p. 55. 

Goodrich observed in his Recollections : " He walked the world like one who neither 
accepted nor desired its friendship .... out of tune with the great harmony of life around 
him .... I think he had been deeply injured — nay ruined by the reading of Byron's 
works," vol. ii, p. 131. 

See also prefatory notes in Kettel and in the British collection of American verse en- 
titled The Columbian Lyre. Kettel compares him to " the sad and despairing prophet of 
the British Lyre." 

4 In the review of Ward's Life and Letters, 1867. 
6 Neal, in Randolph. 



52 Byron and Byronism in America. 

He was an adept in the pose of pride and of lonely con- 
templation of himself as a suffering genius. "A Frag- 
ment " contains such servilely Manfredian verse as : — 

"It is the noon of night, the stars look faint 
With their lone watching .... 

I have thus often sat and deep in thought 

Outwatched the stars .... 

.... I have gained 

Much doubt and little certainty 

****** 

But I have gained a mastery over spirits." 

He could imitate also the sublime in Byron, both of nature 
and of history ; while the decay of Greece and her new 
struggle for liberty were subjects of many lyrics and 
blank verse musings. What was most Byronic in Percival 
seems just what made him most popular — an indirect proof 
of Byron's own popularity. For the rest, a detailed study 
of all Byronic imitations and pilferings of Percival would 
require a separate volume. 1 

The one American, however, now most popularly asso- 
ciated with Byron, is Poe. This rests chiefly on the notes 
of gloom and "nevermore" in his poetry, on his unhappy 
life and romantic appearance, 2 on his pride, 3 and on his 
feats as a swimmer. Only in his earlier work does he 
owe anything to Byron. Tamerlane is "as clever and 
uninteresting an imitation of Byron as was ever printed," 
says his biographer. 4 It has the gloom, pride and guilt of 
the tales, but less of their force, clearness and directness, 

1 In the Poetical Works (1859) Shelley is the guiding spirit. 

2 Poe, in earlier years, says Hewitt, quoted by Woodberry, " wore Byron collars and a 
black stock, and looked the poet all over." 

3 " Byron had sown the evil seed [of pride], but it had fallen on very favorable soil." — 
Woodberry. 

4 Professor Woodberry, in American Men of Letters Series. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1815-1830. 53 

for even here one finds Poe's mystic vein which is un- 
byronic and not adapted to narrative. "The Coliseum," 
in blank verse, in subject, situation, thought and eloquence, 
is very Byronic : a prize poem, it followed the mode. 

In the same year with Poe's first volume, William Gil- 
more Simms published two " daringly Byronic" 1 volumes 
of lyrical verse, and in 1830 " The Tricolor," " a Byronic 
outpouring in honor of the Three Days of July." Choruses 
of Atlantis (1832) were inspired by lyrical passages in 
Manfred. Imitations like the following are rare ; a 
Zephyr-spirit sings : — 



"In the billow before thee 
My form is concealed, 
In the breath that comes o'er thee 
My thought is revealed. 
Strown thickly beneath me 
The coral rocks grow, 
And the waves that enwreath me 
Are working thee woe." 



But Byronic in the usual way is Donna Florida, " a Tale," 
written also in youth, left unfinished and published in 1843 
with an apologetic preface. "He fancied," he there writes, 
" with boyish presumption that he might imitate the grace 
and exceeding felicity of expression in that unhappy per- 
formance \_viz. Don Juan\ — its playfulness and possibly 
its wit — without falling into its licentiousness of utterance 
and malignity of mood." Such was the aim of most of 
our imitators, though they were not so generally desirous 
of "forbearing personal sarcasm and domestic satire," as 
the ever-hearty and leonine Simms. Moreover, Simms as 

1 W. P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms in American Men of Letters Series, p. 58 ; 
see also p. 7 : " In all probability Byron and Scott and Moore had nowhere a more devoted 
admirer than this little Charleston boy." 



54 Byron and Byronism in America. 

a novelist was interested in the story he had to tell, and 
did " not suffer his digressions to be so numerous or so 
long as those of the work which he unwisely made his 
model." This will enable the reader to judge of Donna 
Florida. 



CHAPTER IV. 

BYRON'S LITERARY INFLUENCE, 1830-1860. 

SIMMS, John Neal, and indeed most of the writers men- 
tioned in the last chapter lived on to do better work in 
the period following, but, with the exception of George 
Lunt, they grew away from Byron. Some, notably Poe, 
lived on to strike altogether original notes ; others, like 
Neal and Percival, came under the influence of Shelley or 
of poets contemporary with their own maturity. Byron 
himself was now some years dead, and the romance attach- 
ing to his person and adventures had become with the 
older generation a too familiar tale. Byronism, between 
1830 and i860, is to be traced in writers relatively of less 
importance to the literature of their time. 

Samuel Griswold Goodrich, to whose Recollections^ we 
were indebted in the second chapter, himself wrote Byronic 
verse. The Outcast" 1 is made to confess how 



" One crime hath twined with serpent coil 
Around my heart its fatal fold ; " 

and to recall his boyhood with nature by the sea, as Byron 
had done once and again. But at times, 

1 In the Recollections he speaks of Byron's effect upon him. " There was in me cer- 
tainly none of the misanthropic feeling which made Byron fall in love with such scenes. 
Nevertheless, some passages in Childe Harold which appeared a few years after, described 
the emotions I then experienced." . ..." I had no feeling of unhappiness, no oppressive 
sense of isolation, no anxiety, no ennui." Vol. i, p. 154. 

2 772,5 Outcast and Other Poems, Boston, 1836. 



56 Byron and Byronism in America. 

" Such the madness of my brain 
That I was fain to seek the throng, 
To meet and mingle in the main[?] 
With their mad revelry and song." 



and soon we have it : — 

"Stranger! a murderer stands before thee! 

* ^ ■sfc % 3fc 

I slew my friend .... 

***** 

I wandered forth, I wandered far." 
But at last : — 



" Softened with the flow of years 
My breast is lightened of its cares- 

■5& 3fc $fc %£ 3|£ 

My mothers spirit met my view." 



A touch of piety, resignation and mother-love 1 were de- 
vices, artistic or otherwise, frequently introduced to chasten 
and subdue Byronic tales of gore and gloom for American 
readers. 

Yet the most complete imitation of the Tales, not ex- 
cepting Tamerlane, seems to have been the Jlfe/anie 2 of 
Nathaniel Parker Willis. Willis, so " natty and jaunty 
and gay," as purveyor of the Byronic dark and terrible in 
love and crime, shows how very artificial Byronism might 
become, even among well-known writers. Melanie has 
the movement of Chillon, and attempts to create the Italian 
atmosphere of Bart'sma, as in : — 

1 Note the part mother-love plays in American sentimental literature, as in the Civil 
War songs and modern melodrama. 

2 London, 1835. Willis was at this time travelling in Europe. His Pencillings ap- 
peared in the same year. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1830— 1860. 57 

"It was an endless joy to me 
To see my sister's new delight 
From Venice in its golden sea 
To Paestum in its purple light — 
By sweet Val d'Arno's tinted hills" . . . . l 

But when Angelo, Melanie's betrothed, is revealed as a 
bastard, the horror of her brother, who tells the tale, 
becomes more violently Byronic : — 

" My heart was locked ! The lips might stir, 
The frame might agonize — and yet 
O God ! I could not pray for her ! 
A seal upon my brow was set, 
My brow was hot — my brain oppressed," — etc. 

Finally Angelo's identity is more completely discovered 
before the marriage altar by a nun who shrieks through a 
lattice : — 

"The bridegroom is thy blood — thy brother, 
Rodolph de Brevern wronged his mother ! " 

The nun is thus the mother of all three ! The bride sank 
down dead, but the narrator stoically 

"shed no tears for her," 

realizing that 

" she died 
With her last sunshine in her eyes." 

At this denouement one hardly knows whether one is 
more reminded of Byron — or of the bizarre groups in red, 

1 There are sometimes echoes of Scott's phrase and manner, as : — 
" And sometimes at St. Mona's shrine, 
Worn thin with penance harsh and long." 
The very first line : — 

" I stood on yonder rocky brow," 
is obviously after Byron's : — 

" A king sate on the rocky brow," 
in "The Isles of Greece." 



58 Byron and Byronism in America. 

yellow and blue on the bill-boards advertising a modern 
melodrama. 

In his Lady Jane x Willis was able at once to imitate 
and to maintain something of himself. It is in part a 
social and literary satire, with more temperamental light- 
ness and gayety, more unity of story 2 and mood in its two 
cantos of ottava rima than Don Juan and most American 
imitations. But there is an attempt to intersperse the 
higher poetry, there are digressions 3 with self-conscious 
apologies, comments on contemporaries, and a familiar 
address to the reader in conclusion. Byronic, too, are the 
clever rhymes, as : — 

" I am an old maid, and tho' I suffer by it I 
Must change my style and leave off gay society" — 
or : — 

" Dinner ! ye gods ! what is there more respectable ; 
For eating, who, save Byron, ever checked a belle ? " 

The situation of Lady Jane and Jules, the boy poet, is 
after that of Julia and Juan : — 

" The Lady Jane still thought him but a lad, 
Then why the deuce she didn't treat him so 
Is quite enough to drive conjecture mad." 

Willis' mild desire to be racy — 

"I say, that up to kissing — later even 
A woman's love may have its feet in heaven " — 

is as laughable 4 as his early reputation for a rake and 
lady-killer among relatives and friends who went to church 

1 New York, 1844. 

2 The sub-title is "A Humorous Novel in Rhyme." 

3 Byron, his wife and La Guiccioli are the subjects of Canto ii, 10-11. In imitations of 
Don Juan, references to Byron are the rule without exception. 

4 See the Satire, The Paradise of Fools, next chapter. 



Byron's Literary Influence, 1830-1860. 59 

at Brimstone Corner. The morality of our literature has 
always been the chief boast of our critics. 1 

References to or descriptions of Greek, Italian and 
Oriental ruins elsewhere in Willis' poetry, also suggest 
Byron, who had more than anyone aroused the world's in- 
terest in the picturesqueness and the pathos of the classic 
past. In this respect Willis' verses are paralleled by the 
steel engravings of the Annuals, 2 to which he often fur- 
nished the text. 

The most many-sided imitation of Don Juan as of 
Childe Harold was written by George Lunt. It is five 
cantos of ottava rima, entitled Julia. 3 In general man- 
agement of rhymes and digressions, in attitude of confi- 
dential familiarity with the reader, in interspersion of 
higher poetry and of lyrics it is rather, facile ; but in ideas 
and tone its satire is very mild (frivolity and dancing in 
Boston receiving, perhaps, the most scathing rebuke), and 
without wit. The poetry has an occasional dreary note, 
lamenting 

" The few — down the dull blank waste of years ; " 

and Julia is described on the beach of Nahant, Boston's 
popular summer resort, 4 as one who sadly, 

"gazed .... ever on the dark blue sea; 1 ' 

1 I know of but one imitation of Don Juan which rivals the naughtiness of the true one, 
and the only accessible copy is locked up in a drawer of the Harris Collection at Providence. 
It is entitled Susie Knight, and appeared in the New York Clipper in 1863. 

2 In pictorial art Turner illustrates a great inspiration drawn from Byron as opposed to 
the implicit imitations of the Annual Engravers. Cf. Especially "Childe Harold's Pil- 
grimage" in the National Gallery. The paintings of Cole and Church in America betray 
a slight inspiration. Their historical romantic mood owes something to Childe Harold. 

3 Boston, 1855, with pseudonym Wesley Brooks. The name "Julia " is itself Don 
Juan-ny. 

4 The importation of Byronic heroes, heroines, moods and situations, to well known 
spots in the United States, was one of the minor phases of Byronism, and of the effort to 
found a national literature on English lines. 



60 Byron and Byronism in America. 

and there is a rather harmless tendency to a sensuous de- 
scription of Julia sleeping, when 

" The folded linen on her whiter breast 
Rose with its gentle swell." 

Two passages are taken almost directly from Don Juan. 1 
Miss Julia's coming out, the ball and supper, may have 
been suggested by Fanny. The plot, a girl's true love for 
a poor suitor against her father's harsh and natural prefer- 
ence for a rich one, is a grafting of the universal bour- 
geoise pathetic on Byronism, while the stanzas on the 
childhood home and on the ill-fated poor suitor's final re- 
turn to his mother's arms, illustrates the grafting of the 
specially American bourgeoise pathetic. In an earlier 
volume Lunt had been lyrically Byronic. 2 

The Cabiro 3 of the versatile, long-lived critic, translator 
and poet, George Henry Calvert, is another once read 
American Don Juan, combining tale and satire. The 
former is insignificant. He says, beginning with an 
echo : — 

" Choose well your hero and he '11 make a tale," 

but confesses shortly, affecting the Byronic negligence : — 

" I will build no story, have no plot." 
He rather 

" freely paints 
Together, apes, clowns, mountebanks and writers." 

His remarks on 

"this gay Italian verse" 

1 One is the famous " 'T is sweet,'' etc. 

- Poems, New York, 1839 ; his last volume, 1884, is not Byronic, but it contains a " Hymn 
of Greek Youths " at Byron's funeral —probably written much earlier. 
' A Cantos i-ii, Baltimore, 1840 ; iii-iv, Boston, 1SG4. 



Byron's Literary Influence, i8jo-i86o. 61 

are after Byron's in Beftfto. 1 Cabiro is more intellectual 
than other imitations. It contains good observations on 
the Germans, 2 on Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron him- 
self, on man in general, and on marriage, money and 
dinner. 

Other elements in Byron appealed to Bayard Taylor. 
Apart from his Juvenalia z and a few echoes of lyrics in 
Byron's dramas, 4 Taylor recalls Byron most in his Poems 
of the Orient (1854), °^ which " Amram's Wooing," dif- 
fering from Byron, however, in its happy ending, runs 
some of the lines in The Giaour and the Bride of Abydos 
pretty closely. For a bit of description in Byron's earlier 
vein, not unlike things in the Siege of Corinth, read : — 

" The yellow moon was rising large 
Above the desert's dusky marge, 
And save the jackal's whining moan, 
Or distant camel's gurgling groan, 
And the lamenting monotone 
Of winds that breath their vain desire, 
And on the lonely sands expire, 
A silent charm, a breathless spell, 
Waited with me beside the well." 

For passion, as strong as Selim's, read : — 

" Trembling and panting and oppressed 
She threw herself upon my breast, 
By Allah ! like a bath of flame, 
The seething blood tumultuous came 
From life's hot centres as I drew 
Her mouth to mine, our spirits grew 
Together in one long, long kiss — 
One swooning, speechless pulse of bliss." 

1 Stanza 44. 

2 Calvert was one of our earlier German scholars. His translation of Don Carlos ap- 
peared in 1836. 

3 Ximetia, or The Battle of the Sierra Morena and Other Poems (1844). " To the faint 
lyrical faculty that he already displayed is superadded a very evident affection for the man- 
ner of Scott and Byron and Moore and Mrs. Hemans."— Albert H. Smith, Bayard Taylor, 
p. 33 in American Men of Letters Series. These poems were fifteen in number, and none 
have been included in later works. 

* The lyrics of Deucalion seem to have been influenced by those of Manfred. 



62 Byron and Byronism in America. 

Amram's steed 

" Of Araby's most precious breed " 

is described quite as if twin brother to Mazeppa's. Four 
of Byron's tales contributed to this short piece, yet living 
emotion and steady imagination made it something of 
Taylor's own and a fair poem. 

Albert Pike's poems 1 are dominated by Byron. 2 Besides 
Spenserians on nature and on 

" A soothing melancholy hope inclined," 

and such questionings as 

" What is there left that I should cling to life ? " 

where his sorrow (which was, we know, sincere) was 

more pensive than Byron's, his lyrics are especially to be 

noted : — 

" Fare thee well — it is forever ! 
Thou hast heard my dying words ; 
Till the chords of Jife shall sever, 
Till the serpent Woe that girds 
The exiled heart, its strings have broken, 
Bruised and crushed and shattered it, 
Until this to thee are spoken 
All my words — my dirge is writ." 

His "Song of the Nabajo " is a direct paraphrase of 
" Tambourgi " 3 : — 

"The Moqui may boast from his town of the Rock: 
Can it stand when the earthquake shall come with its shock? 
The Suni may laugh in his desert so dry — 
He will wail to his God when our foray is nigh. 
O who is so brave as a mountain Apache? 
He can come to our homes when the doors we unlatch, 
And plunder our women " — etc. 

1 Prose Sketches and Poems, Boston, 1834. 

2 But Keats' influence is also strong. 

3 Childe Harold, i, 72. 



Byron 's Literary Influence, 1830-1860. 63 

The substitution of Indian for the Oriental names of 
Byron's poetry was only more common than the similar 
substitution for the Scottish names of Scott's. We shall see 
later how Byron's heroes reappear in paint and feathers. 

Charles Fenno Hoffman, 1 now remembered only for 
" Monterey," published thirty-three amorous lyrics, " Eros 
and Anteros," 2 even more Byronic, if possible, than Pike's, 
in this vein : — 

" I knew not how I loved thee — no ! 
I knew it not till all was o'er — 
Until thy lips had told me so — 
Had told me I must love no more ! 

" I knew not how I loved thee ! yet 

I long had loved thee wildly well ; 

I thought 'twere easy to forget, 

I thought a word would break the spell." 

George H. Boker is called in a contemporary satire 3 
" Byron Boker," certainly not for his dramas, which, like 
most literary dramas of those days were modelled on 
Sheridan Knowles, but presumably for his personal ap- 
pearance, or for lyrics such as "Vestigia Retrorsum " 4 : — 

" There is a spot I call accursed 
Because my thoughts forever wing 
Back to its gloom from which they burst 
And settle on the loathsome thing." 

Willis Gaylord Clark 5 wrote gloomy Spenserians, as : — 
" Man sinks down to death, chilled by the touch of time," etc., 

1 The Vigil of Faith and Other Poems, N.Y., 1845. The Vigil, like The Lays of the 
Hudson, 1846, is an Indian tale more in the manner of Scott than of Byron. 

2 In view of the character of the pieces, it is natural to guess that this title itself may- 
have come from Byron. Cf. Manfred, ii, sc. ii : "Eros and Anteros at Gadars." Imita- 
tors of Byron often conned his pages for poetic titles as well as for learned foot-notes. 

3 Parnassus in Pillory, see next chapter. 

4 Plays and Poems, 2 vols., Boston, 1856. 

8 Poems, 1839 (?) Literary Remains, 1844. 



64 Byron and Byronism in America. 

and a lyric " Euthanasia" in the melancholy stanza form 
of "And thou art dead," 1 a once popular model. 

It need hardly be added that most melancholy lyrics of 
minor poets, whether on lost love or lost hope or what not, 
were dominantly Byronic, when not pensive, homely, moral- 
izing after Mrs. Hemans, or, indeed, after Longfellow. 
Sometimes, as in the poems of Sarah Helen Whitman 
relating to Poe, the poignant reality of sorrow lends a gen- 
uine voice even where the situation or theme is Byronic. 2 

The gloom in Richard Henry Stoddard's poetry has 
more than once led to comparisons with Byron. His 
Songs of Summer (1856), containing lines like : — 

" But buried hopes no more will bloom 
As in the days of old, 
My youth is lying in the tomb 
My heart is dead and cold ; " 

even the unrelieved pessimism of T/ie King's Bell (1862) 3 
and the dreary " Rome" 4 are in a plaintive elegiac minor 
key of resignation, very different from the Byronic suffer- 
ance and revolt. Moreover, neither verse forms nor images 
suggest Byron, and Stoddard is much more consciously 
artistic. 

Amusing and sad at once it is to turn to the gloomy 
juvenile verses (1855) of William Winter. Stoddard spoke 
as a man out of his own heart's life, of a "world-sorrow" 
he could express with his own voice ; Winter, as a boy, 
self-consciously imitating another's sorrow and another's 
voice. Juvenile Byronism of a kind was never more com- 

1 "Euthanasia " is the name of the poem preceding this in the so-called " Thyrsa Ele- 
gies," and Clark evidently borrowed it. 

2 Poems, Boston, 1879. In several pieces she echoes intentionally Poe's own voice, as if 
she heard it still. 

3 It shows the influence of Longfellow in the language and versification. 

4 In The Book of the East. 



Byron's Literary Influence, i8jo—i86o. 65 

pletely recorded than in this little volume of one hundred 
and eighty-nine pages, wherein we read : — 

" Childhood is fettered, even the laughing boy- 
Languid and satiate with continual joy " . . . . 

******** 

"Pride wastes affection — what is Wisdom's state? 
The soul is void — the heart is desolate." 

This is mentioned here not without reason, for the time 
was drawing nigh when Byron in America was to influ- 
ence only boys ; indeed, to parallel to-day the imitations 
chronicled in this book, one would have to rifle the desks 
of one's young literary friends, who are yet already wise 
enough to keep their own very early works unpublished 
and locked up. 1 

Before the sixties, Browning and Tennyson had begun to 
succeed Byron, though never popular to the same degree. 
Timrod's fine work was Tennysonian ; Stedman's earlier 
poems in stanza and diction and flavor even more so ; 2 and 
Stoddard adopted the In Memoriam language and stanza. 3 
W. W. Story, whose earlier work was after Tennyson, 
becomes later in psychological analysis, 4 in matter, even 
in the titles he gives his poems, 5 and in the visualized 
and ingenious similes without emotional relation to the 

1 One confessed to me having written a canto to Don Juan only six years ago. 

2 Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic, 1860. "Flood Tide " is "Locksley Hall," even to metre 
and type of simile. For the latter, cf. 

" Cold and shining sea of ages ! like a silver fillet set, 
On the earth's eternal forehead, for her bridal coronet " 

with Tennyson's Pleiades, like " fire-flies tangled in a silver braid," and contrast both trivi- 
alizations of the Cosmos with the great simple similes of Wordsworth and Whitman. 

3 See " A New Christmas Carol " in The Book of the East : — 

" It was not thus in days of yore, 
In brave and merry England's prime, 
Our fathers kept the Christmas time 
The merry Yule that is no more." 

1 See " A Roman Burger in Jerusalem." 

5 As " Padre Banelli proses to the Duke Ludovico Sforza about Leonardo da Vinci." 



66 Byron and Byronism in America. 

context, 1 perhaps the most Browningesque of the poets out 
of George Meredith and — Browning. W. R. Wallace 
(1819-1881), who had begun with Scott and Byron, 2 and 
ended with Tennyson, 3 may be named as one of the many 
not altogether unworthy souls who tried both the old and 
the new. Tennyson's art and "divine despair" succeeded 
Byron's force and gloom, the In Memoriam stanza, Byron's 
Spenserians. 4 

1 Cf " Privation, like a darkened tube, 

Made joy the sweeter, thro' its darkness seen," 

in " The Confessional." Here is not the place to enlarge upon this point. Poetic influ- 
ences are never more subtle and sure than in the similes employed, and there is no more 
interesting work for minute scientific criticism than the tracing of such influences. 

2 Battle of Tippecanoe, 18S7 ; Alban the Pirate, 1848. 

3 Meditations in America, 1851 ; see, especially, verses modelled on " The Palace of 
Art." 

4 It has been out of the question to make this and the preceding chapter absolutely com- 
plete. E. C Pinkney's Rodolph (1825), a two-canto tale of love, and some of his lyrics ; A. B. 
Meek's Songs and Poems of the South (4th ed., Mobile, 1857), and h\$Red Eagle (N.Y., 1855), 
a tale of the Creek Chieftain and the massacre at Fort Mimms, Ala., in 1813 ; "Gonello," a 
gay Florentine tale in Epes Sargent's Songs of the Sea and Other Poe?ns (Boston, 1847), a 
la Don Juan ; R. H. Wilde's Hesperia (Boston, 1867, edited by his son), an elaborate imi- 
tation of Childe Harold ; and possibly a few bits in John Pierpont's Airs of Palestine (1840) 
and in his vigorous lyrics, may be noted in conclusion. 



CHAPTER V. 

BYRON'S SUB-LITERARY INFLUENCE. 

THE general reader has probably no conception of the 
fecundity of American poetasters and the fatuity of 
American publishers. It is extraordinary, even to-day, 
and must undoubtedly remain one of the concomitants of 
democracy, until democracy succeeds in deepening as 
well as in widening culture. It was more extraordinary, 
though not so astonishing, two generations ago. When 
Willis' "Sketches" were great poetry to the public, and 
Maria Gowen Brooks's Zo-phiel appeared as sublime as 
Dante to the critic, 1 when The Token, The Keepsake, The 
Iris, The Hyacinth, The Jewel, The Ladies' Garland, 
etc., with their gold trimmings and sentimental engrav- 
ings, occupied the spot on the parlor tables of the fashion- 
able and elegant, one may expect fecundity in poetasters 
and fatuity in publishers. Work, such as must now detain 
us, can hardly be called literary, yet as the literary impulse, 
the literary process, was there, and the results came out in 
hot-pressed twelves, attractive enough in paper and typog- 
raphy, perhaps it can be best classified as sub-literary. 
However, in American verse, the boundary line is not easy 
to draw with certainty after passing the fields that some 
twenty or thirty have made finally and surely their own. 
In the last two chapters, it may be, there are two or three 
who might better have been named below ; and below, it 

1 To Grisnold ; see his Female Poets. Zophiel, though recalling in its plot Byron's 
Heaven and Earth, is in style modelled on Southey and Moore. 



68 Byron and Byron ism in America. 

may be, are two or three who might better have been 
named in the last chapters. 

Sub-literary Byronism may be traced in imitations of 
the English Bards, of the lyrics, of the tales, of Childe 
Harold, and of Don Juan. Byron's reading dramas, save 
Manfred, seem to have made little impression on either 
literary or sub-literary writers ; his acting dramas none at 
all. 1 It will be convenient to group our material chrono- 
logically under these heads. I will take the English 
Bards first, for here we have not only imitations, but fre- 
quent allusions to contemporary Byronism. 



I. The English Bards. 

In 1817, Solyman Brown published his views of Ameri- 
can verse 2 in homespun heroics. They have something of 
the directness and miscellaneous character of the English 
Bards, though his satire was no servile copy like some 
below. His attack on 

"The loathsome filth of Scotch Reviewers" 

seems to have been prompted by a genuine animus against 
the Edinburgh Review, long shared by many Americans. 
Byron himself is referred to as "faithless," and his domes- 
tic troubles are discussed in the notes, while a lyric among 

1 Byron's effect on the American Stage seems to have been confined to his " Drury Lane 
Address." See, Rejected Addresses (bona fide), New York, 1821, written for the reopen- 
ing of the Park Theatre, which, like Drury Lane, had been destroyed by fire. Charles 
Sprague was awarded the prize, but his couplets are independent of Byron's. Yet the two 
pieces appear to have been popularly associated. See : — " Will Byron's prize address at 
Drury Lane compare with Sprague's at the Park Theatre ?" — Knickerbocker Magazine, 
June, 1834. 

Werner and Sardanapalus, however, have been acted in America. 

2 An Essay on American Poetry and Other Poems, New Haven. It was reviewed the 
next year by Bryant in the North American. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 69 

"other poems" represents Lady Byron upbraiding her 
Lord. 1 

More lively is "a satirical effusion " by J. L. Martin, 2 
which is modelled both on Pope and Byron. With the 
savagery of the latter he goes hand over fist in medias 
res : — 

" And first, ye Yankee Byrons, take your part, 
Ye mimic Harolds, feel the well-earned smart, 
Ye merchant Corsairs, legal Laras .... 
.... aspiring to attain 
The lordly poet's dark Promethean strain." 

And he asseverates that they will have to do more than 
affect long hair, a cloak of " gloomy fold," and a naked 
neck ; nor even 

" by wandering with a lowering brow, 

Nor walking among men as in a cloud." 

shall they attain it. It is 

" a nauseous trick 
Which can deceive some foolish girl at most," 

since 

" The outward form cannot the mind avail." 

His advice was timely : — 

" Go plough your fields, teach hopeful youth " . . . . 

anything mundane and practical — 

" But sport not antics on the awful grave 
Of him alas ! whom genius could not save." 



1 " Fair thee well, inconstant lover ! 

If thy fickle flame was love, 
Tho' our transient joys are over 
I can ne'er inconstant prove,"— etc. 

-Native Bards, "A satirical effusion by J. L. M.," Philadelphia, 1831. 



70 Byron and Byronism in America. 

Here follow a page of panegyric on Byron and some ob- 
servations on American imitators of Moore, the only other 
contemporary English poet he names. To the same date 
belongs Truth, "A New Year's Gift for Scribblers" by 
Joseph Snelling, dubbed by Willis, " Smelling Joseph." It 
is equally rough, and somewhat Byronic. 

In Reviewers Reviewed? many of the phrases are copied 
or imitated from English Bards, but the marked attempt 
at reasoning, the frequent triplets, enjambements and Alex- 
andrines, suggest Dryden, who is besides mentioned promi- 
nently, rather than Byron as the model, and it need not 
detain us. 

Probably the most notorious in its day was The Quacks 
of Helicon? by L. A. Wilmer. It is in the form of a 
Popian epistle, beginning : — 

" Against usurpers, Olney, I declare 
A righteous, just and patriotic war," 

but the virulence of the war is Byronic. He reviles the 
ballads of the genial Morris and the inanity of well- 
groomed Willis, while Bryant and Longfellow are handled 
as rudely as Byron had handled Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge. Even Poe, who bore Longfellow no especial friend- 
ship, felt called upon to protest. 3 I quote as a specimen 
what he says on the drama : — 

" Now poesy and taste yield up the stage 
To all the trash and twaddle of the age, 
To light-heeled harlots, eunuchs and buffoons, 
Black-souled Biancas and black-faced Zip Coons." 

This was written at a time, it will be remembered, when 

1 New York, 1837, by Miss A. C. Ritchie, in vengeance for uncomplimentary notices of 
Pelayo, a rhymed metrical romance after Southey and Scott. 

2 Philadelphia. 1841. Wilmer was the author of the sensational exposure, Our Press 
Gang. 

3 In a review of the piece, reprinted in Poe's collected works. 



Byron's Stib-Literary Influence. 71 

American "poets" 1 were making strenuous efforts, now 
long since abandoned, to produce literary stage plays in 
verse. 

Another Philadelphia satire, The Poets and Poetry of 
America, followed in 1847, under the pseudonym " La- 
vante." 2 It is the most literal of imitations: the substi- 
tution of an American for an English name is often the 
only original element ; Byron's "Boeotian Cottle," becomes 
"Boeotian Hill," "Unhappy White," "Unhappy Clark; " 

" Precocious Sargent to the drama dear," 

is from 

" Coleridge .... To timid ode and turgid stanza dear," 
and 

" Health to prejudging Saunders ! " 
is from 

"Health to immortal Jeffrey!" — 

and so forth. The ideas, metaphors, allusions, animus are 
equally servile. Byron is mentioned by name as the mas- 
ter satirist, to whom " Lavante " naturally feels a kinship 
in experience and in power. He confessed : — 

" I too can rhyme and in my time have sung 
When hope was high and infant muse was young," 

because Byron had confessed : — 

" I too can scrawl, and once upon a time 
I poured along the town a flood of rhyme, 
A school boy's freak ; " 

1 As Hillhouse, Payne, Sargent, Calvert, Matthews, Dawes, Osborne, Willis, Mrs. 
Ellet, and Mrs. Mowatt, the actress. 

2 An edition (New York, 1887), contains an introduction by " Geoffrey Quarles " to prove 
Poe its author. This reads like a hoax ; Wilmer's name is pencilled in the copy in the 
Columbia University Library. 



72 Byron and Byronism in America. 

and he closes with a universal challenge, having all the 
bravado of the closing paragraph of his model. 

The author of Parnassus in Pillory? though invoking 
the aid of Horace and Pope, derived his real inspiration 
also from the angry young lord. The elegance of Pope 
had fitted well the quiet, accomplished colonial gentlemen, 
but it was less in keeping with the rough and ready bump- 
tiousness of these times. After denouncing Lowell as 

" now sententious, now most wordy," 
and Morris as 

" A household poet whose domestic muse," 
Is soft as milk and sage as Mother Goose," 

and arraigning the throng who are 

" Aping his strains, with throats all cracked and wheezy," 

and after sneering that 

" Lunt's lead with Byron's gold was soldered, 
That Wordsworth dribbles thro' meandering Stoddard, 
.... that Harvard grants its benison 
To those alone who canonize Saint Tennyson," 

and pitching into everybody else on his 

" Pegasus the skittish " 
even to 

"our critic friends, the British," 2 

he dismounts, lays down his mace, and concludes with 
satisfaction, 

" An honest Anglo-Saxon round of blows 
I 've dealt alike upon my friends, and foes." 

1 " Motley Manners" [A. J. H. Duganne], New York, 1851. 

2 He has taken the rhyme from Don Juan, i, 209. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 73 

His testimony on then existing conditions is interesting. 
He voiced with Poe, Cornelius Matthews, Bryant, Griswold, 
R. G. White, and others, the growing desire for interna- 
tional copyright. 1 He was sensible of our limitations ; 

Bryant was, he granted, 

" Brobdignagian — but 
Just so was Gulliver in Lilliput ; " 

and he noted with patriotic disdain how 

" Our country swarms with bards who 've crossed the water 
And think their native land earth's meanest quarter," 

and who 

"Muse, just like Byron, on the Bridge of Sighs." 2 

The last to be mentioned bears the modest title of 
Parnassus in Philadelphia. 5 Disgusted with contempo- 
rary letters, the author admits : — 

" Once I was fool enough to spin like these 
My idle rhymes, in hopes like them to please, 
A youthful freak, tho' older heads have oft 
By time grown mellowed, proved themselves as soft." 

And again, as Byron had referred back to the time when 

" a Pope's pure strain 
Sought the rapt ear to charm nor sought in vain," 

so he to that 

" When Scott and Byron with a thousand more 
Chaunted their hallowed strains from 

Albia's [sic] shore." 

1 See, inter alia, Speech on International Copyright, delivered at the dinner to Charles 
Dickens, N.Y., Feb. 19, 1842, and the Appeal on Behalf of International Copyright, N.Y., 
1842, by Matthews ; Address to the People of the United States on Behalf oj the American 
Copyright Club, N.Y., 1843, by Bryant ; and The American View of 'the Copyright Ques- 
tion, by White, in the Broadway Magazine for May, 1868. 

2 As H. T. Tuckerman {Poems, Boston, 1851) who wrote some blank verse on Lord 
Byron at Venice, or E. D. Griffin with his "Lines on Leaving Italy," historic and Spen- 
serian (see Griswold's Poets), or George Hill, the dyspeptic consul for Asia Minor, whose 
verses on " The Ruins of Athens " bemoaned man's 

" weary spirit that forsaken plods 
The world's wide wilderness." 

3 By Peter Pindar, Jr., [H. S. Ellenwood], Phil., 1854. 



74 Byron and Byronism in America. 

He has a "goose-quill," like Byron's, " eager for the war ; " 
he judges, like Byron, the critical merits of Jeffrey and 
Gifford ; and becomes very personal in discussing his 
countrymen : — 

" Go, Byron-headed Boker, mend thy verse, 
But stick to blank — tho' poor, thy rhyme is worse ; " 

J. J. Woodward, 

" Seeks to rival fame and Walter Scott," 
and 

"dark revengeful is his hollow tone," 
while 

"Deep passion, too, for amorous maids he deals [sic — feels?] 
And what he lacks himself, from others steals — 
Scott, Moore and Byron ; " 

but of Morris : — 

" Simple thy strain, and sweet thy little song 
Wakes no resentment as it flows along." 

He subjoins copious footnotes, imitating the dash and hit 
or miss of his lordship's, with quotations from Horace and 
Pope and Italian proverbs, all of which he undoubtedly 
filched (a common trick) from his own well-thumbed 
edition of Byron. 

Pathetic and portentous is this in conclusion : — 

" Hark ! from New England's peaceful shores arise 
Ten thousand lyres, whose music sweeps the skies 
While, like the echo from Apollo's strain, 
The South wafts back a kindred song again ! 
But thou, O Philadelphia ! Poesy, 
Tho' living yet, is almost dead to thee." 

It is to the ten thousand lyres and the kindred song 
that we must now turn. 1 

1 Of the many literary satires of those days only the Fable for Critics has survived, 
and it is a genre by itself. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 75 

II. The Lyrics. 

In the imitations of Byron's lyrics we are especially 
reminded of Byronism in the early newspapers, and as has 
already been said were reprinted from magazines and an- 
nuals. 1 Byronic lyrics were naturally a most prevalent 
form of Byronism. There are those still living who can 
recall the time when it was almost as fashionable and fitting 
for refined ladies and gentlemen to dash off a Byronic 
stanza or two, as it was 

" In gallant days of ruffed Elizabeth " 

to write sonnets, or in prim Queen Anne's to turn an epi- 
gram. Beside much prevailingly amorous, skeptical or 
gloomy, there was much after Byron's Greek poetry and 
the Hebrew Melodies. 

The verse about Byron has been already touched on, 
but the temptation can not be resisted to revert to it here. 
Rev. J. W. Curtis, M.A., 2 deemed 

" The muse of pure Watts the finest of gold," 

and said of Byron, he left 

" a poet's name to other times 
Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes, 
Oh ! never may our country mourn the fate 
Of native bard like him." 

The one virtue appears from another lyric to have been 
his death for Greece. Rev. J. W. Curtis has also lines on 
Greek liberty, and he ranked himself with Brooks, Percival 
and Byron as a philhellenic bard. 

1 Some were even reprinted from the newspapers, as the verses of " the Boston Bard." 
"-Poems, N.Y., 1846. 



76 Byron and Byronism in America. 

Byron's separation from his wife, his quarrels, the 
refusal of the dignitaries of Westminister Abbey to admit 
his body to burial, were also favorite themes. On the last 
the popular feeling, popularly expressed, was : — 

" When Freedom and Genius in triumph return 
To rebuild their old temples and visit the new, 
The first shall an altar erect to his urn, 
And the strains of the second shall hallow it too." x 

Further citations would belong rather in some unwritten 
book on American humor. 

The most interesting and tragic of all followers of Byron 
in his wild life and wilder lyrics of despair, bravado 
and aspiration, was McDonald Clarke, "the mad poet,'' 
as he was called and called himself. The bitterest experi- 
ences of life overthrew his sensitive, craving nature, 2 and 
gave his numerous erratic volumes sometimes a reality, a 
pathos, which not even their extreme chaos, crudity and 
imitative style can destroy. He showed, too, brief flashes 
of genius, striking off occasional metaphors of surprising 
originality and power, 3 and some tender stanzas of poign- 
ant simplicity. 4 By misfortune and temperament he was 
drawn to Byron. "When Byron was in the hey-day of 

1 Cf. " The Greeks will erect a monument to his memory out of the ruins of the tombs 
of Pindar and Alcibiades ; and when time has sunk some glaring instances of his profligacy 
into dimness and shade, the mitred guardians of Westminster Abbey may permit a slab to 
be sculptured with his name." — Advice on the Pursuits of Literature, by S. L. Knapp (?). 

2 See the heart-rending preface to his Elixir of Moonshine, N.Y., 1822. 

3 See " Memorial of M'Donald Clarke " in Book Notes, Feb. 2, 1884. 

" Freedom in shirtless majesty," 



and the well-known 

are his, 
4 As 



' Now twilight lets her curtain down 
And pins it with a star " 



" O man must have a home, a home, 
It matters not how poor it be." — 
He had none and Halleck made him the subject of his poem, " The Discarded." 



Byron's Sub- Literary Influence. 77 

his career, Clarke was among the most ardent of his ad- 
mirers, and, as he supposed, of his imitators. He con- 
ceived that their minds had been cast in the same mould — 
pictures of Byron, with open collar and massy locks, were 
then in the print shops, and Clarke sedulously copied his 
air and costume. Byron married and abused his wife. 
Clarke, to extend the parallel, did the same in both re- 
spects." x He was Byron-mad, even frontispiecing his 
works with his own portrait, having side pose, collar and 
locks almost identical with Byron's, and, save for the 
somewhat more angular features, hardly to be distinguished 
from his. Much of his verse is on his personal misery, 
poverty, loneliness, disappointments in love and fame ; 
much is on " world-sorrow," and on Byron. " Few," he 
wrote, 

" Few have the strength of brain to bear 

The unshadowed noon of fortune's day ; 

Envy's fierce insects hover there — 

The worrying sting — the wasting ray, 

Will fret and fever all." 

In the same piece : — 

" All lesser lights have waned before 
The presence of that soul sublime [Byron] ; 
Its blaze has reached the bleakest shore, 
Throughout the darkest years of Time." 

Yet he published some Burlesques on Byron (1823), when 
Byron had begun to burlesque himself. 2 

1 The New York Commercial Advertizer \ Feb. 26, 1842 ; this is part gossip, but com- 
pare, " We have known more than one fool fancy himself a genius and to create the same 
illusion in others, quarrel with his wife and part from her to become more like Lord 
Byron." — Western Monthly Review, vol. iii., 1829. 

2 A Sketch of M* Donald Clarke (50 copies) by Clark Jiilson appeared in Worcester in 
1878. The author had evidently been much affected by Clarke's personal prefaces, from 
which all the facts for the sketcli were gleaned. It is extremely crude. J. G. Wilson has 
a few words on Clarke in Bryant and his Friends. 



78 Byron and Byronism in America. 

Attention may be called to the gloomy American Byronic 

lyrics with a pious ending. They were very frequent. 

The following is characteristically American : — 

" Doth gloomy fate with sullen frown 
Consume thy soul with care? 
Hast thou the draught of misery known, 
Whose dregs are dark despair? 
Art thou oppressed with sorrow's doom, 
Thy heart with anguish torn ? 
O soon that sad and cheerless gloom 
Shall make a brighter morn."' x 

Sometimes the Byronic style is used for an unbyronic 
mood : — 

" My God ! My God ! how shall I speak 
The transports of a bursting heart? 
Not words — oh no — they are too weak — 
My anguished joy they can't impart, 
Feelings which cloy the tongue are mine. 
Should speech essay — the utterance vain, 
For holy awe and love divine 
Each riven faculty enchain." 

The author of this nonsense 2 tried, however, in spite of 
" holy awe and love divine " to be pessimist : — 

" Though I live for the world, I despise it, 
Its light is the meteor's glare, 
And woe to the wretch who shall prize it — 
His portion is naught but despair," 

as well as a stoic-lover in words : — 

" Farewell ! forever fare thee well, 
Without one sigh I part ; 
And not one treacherous tear shall tell 
The anguish of my heart." 

1 Poems ; W. B. Tappan, Phil., 1834. 

2 Jay Adams, in The Charter Oak and Other Poems, N.Y., 1839. 



Byron's Sub- Literary Influence. 79 

He was not a school boy, as one would suppose, but " en- 
gaged sedulously in active mercantile pursuits," and only 
" by circumstances forced over the hedge into the literary 
field." He trusted, he said, the reading of his book would 
" hasten the day when the good and the great of our land 
shall acknowledge the influence of soul-lifting poetry." 1 

Byron's lighter lyrics were also imitated ; for illus- 
tration, this of L. T. Cist, 2 on a "A Beautiful Quakeress," 
may suffice : — 

" Oh ! never talk again to me 
Of dashing belles and high-born misses 
Till it has been your lot to see 
A meeting full of Quakeresses." 

Here is a mingling of influences from different sources 
(for the subject is that of an early poem of Byron, and the 
style that of the " Stanzas to Cadiz"), which may be in- 
stanced, in passing, as typical of a common phenomenon. 
Very much affected was the lyric of gloom by the 
ladies. From Maria G. Brooks's early poems 3 to the 
twelfth ( ! ) edition of Mrs. Helen Truesdell's works, 4 
in spite of Moore, Southey, Scott, Mrs. Hemans, and 
" L. E. L.," echos of Byron are very audible. Mrs. Trues- 
dell mentions a certain " Byrona " who 

" touched a mournful chord 
That vibrates every hour, 
With all a poet's gentle skill, 
A woman's gentle power," 

but her fame seems to have escaped even Griswold. Her 
"vibrations" were probably in the Annuals. 

1 See his preface. 

2 Trifles in Verse, Cincinnati, 1845. The author also imitated Burns. 

3 Judith and Other Poems, Boston, 1820. 

4 Cincinnati, 1859. 



80 Byron and Byronism in America. 

Many pages might be occupied with chronicling the 
" Melodies." One author complained in his preface, " We 
already have a sufficiency," instancing "Amatory," "Sa- 
cred," " Pastoral," and even " Indian Melodies" — to which 
he might have added " Cold Water Melodies," by a forgot- 
ten temperance advocate, Wallace. He found this, how- 
ever, no argument against his own Christian Melodies. 1 
Almost all, as far as examined, are after Byron, rather 
than Moore or Mrs. Hemans. Even to-day many good 
Bible-reading Americans, who renounce Byron, know the 
Hebrew Melodies. Many verses were almost copies, as 
this from the fourth ( ! ) edition of Christian Songs, by a 
Philadelphia pastor 2 : — 

" The rough winds were warring on broad Galilea, 
And the fathomless waters rolled foaming and free, 
The strong blasts of Hermon came down in their might 
And the palms of Manasseh were bowed in their flight." 

" She Walks in Beauty" and " Belshazzar " were studied 
with similar results. 



III. The Tales. 

With good souls of more leisure Byronic tales were a 
favorite employment, especially, it seems, about 1830-1840. 
The conjugal couple, James G. and Mary E. Brooks, found 
time for a deal of Byronizing, but the flower of their joint 
labors was The Rivals of Este. % The gloom, the crime, the 
nature scenes, the phrases and the meter are from Parisina, 
as indeed the title suggests. Yet, for an imitation, it ma}' 

1 George Bettner, M.D., N.Y., 1853. 

2 Rev. J. G. Lyons, Phil., 1849. Did he have a large and devoted congregation —else 
how a fourth edition ? 

X. Y., 1829. 



Byron '5 Sub-Literary Influence. 81 

rank higher than Willis' Melanie, as may be guessed from 
this brief extract : — 

" Once more 't is solitary, lone, 
Where love, crime, hatred, claimed their own, 
And owlets rear their dusky brood, 
Where he the dark avenger stood. 
There is no death-wail by that grave, 
Save as the night wind meets the wave, 
And if perchance one forest flower, 
Blushes in that deserted bower, 
Unloved, unplucked, its beauties glow 
Only for her that sleeps below." 

Very Byronic tales predominate in the works of Mrs. 
S. A. Lewis. 1 Florence, an Italian Tale of Lord Ugo's 
only child and her lover Leone, also recalls Parisina; this 
is followed by one on " Zenel," 

" a peasant's daughter, blithe and fair " 

of Sunny Spain. Byron did much to popularize Spain in 
Europe, especially in France ; the same psychological 
process gave America "Zenel," and may have indirectly 
aroused Bryant to his translations from the Spanish. This 
tale contains a curious admixture of the bourgeoise senti- 
mental, neither Spanish nor Byronic; but her "Pirate," of 
whom 

" None knew his lineage or his land 
Nor when he first came to their strand, 
The crime or woe that drove him from 
His country, kindred, native home," 

brings us back to The Corsair and Lara, while her 
"Bride of Guayaquil" is a short Indianized Byronic tale. 

1 Records of the Heart, N.Y., 1844. 



82 Byron and Byronism in America. 

For the rest, Mrs. Lewis was a cultivated lady, fond of 
Byron and 

" his immortal wreath of woes," 

who could quote Latin and Italian, and explain Greek 
meters in her notes. 

In " Kaughnawah"^ !) Byron's hero, tricked out with 
feathers, knife and tomahawk, and moving with contorted 

visage — 

(" a hellish scowl his visage wore ") — 

delivered a stoic speech 

" on a frowning rock " 

above Niagara, and then leapt over and down. The 
Indian of the popular imagination, about this time also 
very numerous in American melodrama, this proud, brave, 
free, vengeful, blood-thirsty, generous relic of "an extinct 
race which never existed," had many traits in common with 
the earlier Byronic hero, and the temptation to depict him 
in the verse of the Giaour or of Lara was not always 
resisted. Kaughnawah was not drowned in Niagara — at 
least not permanently, but space forbids our following him 
through the pages of other poetasters. 2 

Less obvious, but scarcely less frequent, was the meta- 
morphosis of sex. Byron's women were the softest and 
gentlest of creatures : those of his imitators were as often 
also dark wretches like this same author's " Zethe," who 
figures in a tale of guilt, pride and thunderstorm : — 

1 Zethe and Other Poems, E. D. Kennicott, Rochester, 1837. 

2 Even the poor little girl, Lucretia Davidson, could write in her fourteenth year : — 

" What sight of horror, fear and woe 
Now greets Chief Hillis-ha-ad-joe-, 
What thought of blood now lights his eye ? " — 
Remains, edited with biographical sketch by S. F. B. Morse ; N.Y., 1825(?) 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 83 

" Though young in years, no roses blushed 
Upon that pale and grief-worn cheek, 

Those awful omens that reveal 
The conflicts of a sinful soul — 

jk A A A A A 

O God ! it was a fearful sight 

At such an hour — on such a night 

To view a thing so frail — so fair." 

" Zethe " is thus a compound of the Byronic hero and 
heroine. But from other pieces in the volume we judge 
the author to have been an orderly, pious citizen, who 
desired 

" A hope well anchored in the sky," 

and loved and sang his " Cottage Home" as sentimentally 
as Woodworth "The Old Oaken Bucket." 

Mrs. E. Anne Lewis, a good mother and housewife no 
doubt, seems to have outstripped all her sisters in Byron- 
izing. Her Child of the Sea (1848), on, 

" The sorrowings of Beauty in her prime, 7 ' 
and 

" Despair untold before in prose or rhyme," 

once received some attention. 1 It is modelled on The 
Corsair? with the scene laid in the Levant and personages, 
Zamen and Mynera, of oriental name, but it draws, too, 
upon the incidents in Byron's own life. Two of the cantos 
are headed with quotations from Petrarch to match Byron's 
from Dante ; the third canto shows from the text and ex- 
planatory notes that she has been reading The Island, 

1 It was favorably reviewed by Poe with characteristic — chivalry ; see also his Corres- 
pondence. 

2 Edwin C Holland, of Charleston, had remodelled The Corsair into a blank verse 
melodrama, (1818), preserving plot and original diction, I am told. I have not been able to 
see it myself. 



84 Byron and Byronism in America. 

while her frequent citations from Gibbon are taken out of 
Byron's. It contains also many allusions to Greece, pil- 
fered from The Giaour and Childe Harold. Her " Isa- 
belle, or the Broken Heart, a tale of Hispaniola," is after 
The Prisoner of Chillon ; her "Lament of LaVega," 
fifteen Spenserians, echoes the lines and spirit of Childe 
Harold, i-ii ; some extremely " Elegiac Stanzas," result- 
ing from " Meditations on the Genius and Poetry of Le- 
titia Elizabeth Landon," are as close to Childe Harold, iv, 
with at least one echo from Adonais. "The Last Hour 
of Sappho" was spent in mouthing heroics a la Corsair, 
the final plunge being described with abrupt lines, after 
the close of Gray's " Bard." 

I will cite but the name of Emma C. Embury, 1 who in 
her youth, over the Byronic signature " Ianthe," described 
" Guido," a "castle's lord," (one who 

" in truth 
Had tasted sorrow," 

and who, like Lara at the ball, 

" stood apart from all, — a smile 
Of cold contempt curled his pale lips the while ") ; 

and the names of Elizabeth C. Kinney, who wrote Felicita? 
" a metrical Romance" of one hundred and eighty pages ; 
of William Duff Telfer, who described the first battle of 
Manassas ; s of Pliny Earle ; 4 of Mary Pumpelly ; B and will 
now replace the works of these estimable ladies and gen- 
tlemen, kindly and reverently on the shelves. 

1 Poems, first collected edition, N.Y., 1869. 

2 N.Y., 1855. 

3 N.Y., 1864. 

4 Marathon and Other Poems, Phil., 1841. 

6 Poems, N.Y., 1852, with an introduction by Willis. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 85 

It must be noted that the oriental tales show sometimes 
traces of Lalla Rookh, the Indian tales, of Scott. Scott 
was often an independent model, and as such as easily 
recognized as Byron. This from Ensinore 1 is as good an 
illustration as any : — 

" A sachem he, of high renown, 
Yet not a Narragansett he, 
Or Delaware or Shawanee, 
Huron nor Ottawa his race, 
Nor his a Tuscaroran face ; 
Nor led he e'er to battle forth 
The five fierce nations of the North." 

Scott's northern clan chieftains, by the way, were not so 
very distantly related to Byron's Levantine pirates ; the 
Celtic Ossian and the oriental Giaour were but two phases 
of the same romantic movement ; and a third, it seems to 
me, is to be found in the American Indian, whether in 
Cooper, on the stage, or in such tales as these after Scott 
and Byron. 

IV. Childe Harold. 

On the imitations of Childe Harold we may recall here 
the words of Goodrich and Longfellow, and the brief 
remarks in chapters ii, iii and iv. It is, however, only when 

1 P. H. Myers, N.Y., 1840. 

Other imitations of Scott, without reference to merit, were : — William and Ellen, N.Y., 
1811. The Lady of the Wreck (a parody) , George Colman, Jr. [?] The Lay of the Scottish 
Fiddle (a. parody), J. K. Paulding, N.Y., 1813. Jokeby, ibid. Blue Lights, J. M. Scott, 
N.Y., 1817. Yamoyden, Rev. J. W. Eastburn and Robert C Sands, N.Y., 1820. (Parts 
are reminiscent of Byron ; Sand's metrical romance. The Bridal of Vaumond is founded on 
the plot of Byron's Deformed Transformed.) Powhatan, Seba Smith, N.Y., 1841. The 
Maid of the Doe, Cornelius Matthews, [?] Washington, 1842. Tecumseh, G. H. Colton, 
N.Y., 1842. Redburn, anon,, N.Y., 1845. Froissart Ballads, P. P. Cooke, Phil., 1847. 
Frontenac, A. B. Street, 1849. Monterey, Frances J. Crosby, N.Y., 1851. (She wrote a 
short Byronic piece in blank verse, called "The Misanthrope.") Ulric, T. S. Fay, N.Y., 
1851. Marmion was dramatized by J. N. Barker, and acted in New York in 1812; see 
Dunlap's History of the American Stage, N.Y., 1832. 



86 Byron and Byronism in America. 

we go to Griswold or to the forgotten works below that 
we learn for ourselves how numerous they were. The 
Byronic Spenserian became the general medium, not only 
for affected "world-sorrow," but for would-be eloquence 
on history, nature, ethics, philosophy and orthodox re- 
ligion. 

Its rhetorical tone appealed especially to the poetizing 

clergy, of whom William Allen, D.D., may be taken as 

representative. He was the author of Wunnisso, or The 

Vale of the Hoosatunnuck, 1 " a poem with notes." Besides 

its ungrateful aspersions on its model — 

" Byron ! Idol of a giddy age ! " — 
" Genius of immortal mind how sunk ! " 2 
and on the " vile Anacreonic notes," and 

" sullen gleams of fierce demoniac fire," 

(contrasted very fittingly with "Montgomery's congenial 
mind"), its heroine, who 

" loved all nature's varying shapes " 
and felt with 

" A joy sublime her lofty mind o'erswayed," 

has, though but an Indian virgin, some features of the 
solitary Pilgrim. The good Doctor was, for all his com- 
placent pomposity and provincial solemnity, the distin- 
guished President of the college which gave us Longfellow 
and Hawthorne. 

1 Boston, 1856, but written in 1826. 

2 Cf. The Course of Time, by The Rev. Peacock, of Scotland. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 87 

Indian themes were a favorite with S. L. Farmer, 1 who 
told how : — 

" From Damariscotta the strong Norridgewock 
Went forth and dared Pejypcot's boiling flood." 

Equally burlesque is his piece on "The Disinterred Mas- 
todon": — 

" Dark mouldered relic of an elder time," 

where Byron's historic mood is expanded into the prehis- 
toric without a corresponding expansion in poetic effect. 

The majestic sadness of the past was reiterated, with 
pilferings also from the Hebrew Melodies, by J. Law- 
rence, 2 Jr., and C. W. Everest ; 3 but it would be, perhaps, 
as fatuous and idle as the "poems" themselves were I to 
chronicle scrupulously every one of the authors whose 
volumes are piled about my desk. Here is the Rev. T. 
Newton Brown, 4 who muses on time's flight and the 
heavenly hope ; here is the Rev. Phineas Robinson, D.D., 
with four hundred and eleven pages on "Immortality? — 
a poem in ten cantos;" here is the anonymous author of 
Song Leaves? who in an 

"unpretending tale chimed to a broken lute," 

illustrates the point of his preface that "poetry in weak 
hands is a powerless weapon," by giving us some hundred 
pages of Spenserians on storms, stars, politics, laudation of 

' Poems, 1830. 

2 Poems, N.Y.,1833. 

I Babylon, Hartford, 1838. 

4 Emily and Other Poems, Concord, N.H., 1840. 
r 'N.Y.,1846. 

II N.Y., 1852. 



88 Byron and Byronism in America. 

poets and heroes, fame, freedom, retribution, castles of the 
Rhine and " woman's honied kiss" for which, like Byron, 
he "braves the world" or "commits a crime;" here is 
S. L. Fairfield, 1 firmly believing that 

" There 's a cheering hope still left in heaven," 

yet wailing 

"all is pain, 
Our birth, life, death — and onward as we glide 
We leave behind the things we love, full fain 
To linger near past joys we shall not see again;" 

here is J. F. Col man, 2 who somewhere in his nine cantos 
wails, too, how 

" Shivering we grope in memory's moonless night 
And stretch blind arms, which ne'er may reunite 
The severed ties of youth," 

repudiating, however, Byron's irreligion and 

" foul atheism's leprous stain," 

while he tries the sublime in describing Waterloo and in 
bidding the sun to 

" roll along, on thy unsevering axle ; " 

here is W. T. Bacon 3 with his views on "Life" and 
Greece and Rome and hard words to tyrants, who also 
imitates Byron's blank verse in "A Vision of War;" 
here is W. O. Bourne, 4 who discourses on Egypt and on 

" the iron pen of time 
Writing didactic lines of light and truth sublime," 

believing 

1 Poetical Works, Phil., 1842. 

2 The Island Bride, Boston, 1846. 
:i Poems, Cambridge, 1848. 

4 Poems, N.Y., 1850. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 89 

" that alone shall tower 
Which bears diviner impress, or which springs 
Where Heaven's transcendent power its life immortal flings;" 

here is Charles Sangster, 1 who cultivates the grand and 
gloomy in nature, and apostrophizes Montcalm and Wolfe, 
and mingles some incoalescent imitations of Shelley ; here 
is R. T. Conrad with Devotional Poems;" and Lurania 
Munday with Acacian Lyrics, 5 as melancholy and help- 
less as you please, in spite of the obvious influence of Mrs. 
Hemans ; here is W. G. Dix, 4 presenting us "Thoughts" 
and "Visions of Immortal Life;" and Anna C. Lynch, 5 
with a school composition, apostrophizing the Mediter- 
ranean, and a description of "Byron among the Ruins of 
Greece," embellished with an engraving ; and here is John 
Holland, 6 grandiloquent of mountains, victories, and noble 
red men and Bunker Hill — 

(" Yet men will mingle and comment upon 
Thy melting legions and the wondrous day 
When earth revealed a second Marathon 
And bravery reared a new Thermopylae ") — 

here is Sidney Russel, 7 with much to say on New England 
and the innocents burned on "the execrable hill" at 
Salem, whose other models, as he mentions in his preface, 

were Tennyson and Browning ; here is but these 

should do. Yet none of these writers, it is but fair to 
say, was more servilely imitative, more impudently silly 
than a certain youth who as late as 1890 published an 

1 The St. Lawrence and Other Poems, N.V., 1856. 

2 Phil., 1862. 

3 Cincinnati, 1860. 

4 Boston, 1848. 

6 Poems, N.Y., 1849. 

Poems, Boston, 1858. 

7 Poems, Phil., 1859. 



90 Byron and Byronism in America. 

In Memoriam in that great centre of modern enlighten- 
ment, Chicago ; for the vain fecundity of American poet- 
asters did not cease altogether when they ceased to 
imitate Byron. 



V. Don Juan. 

I have remarked more than once on the popularity of 
the Byronic Mrs. Hemans ; and one has but to glance at 
her tales and longer historical poems, with their romanti- 
cism, gloom and pseudo-grandeur, with their French and 
Italian mottoes, to note affinities with Byron on the one 
hand, and with our versifiers on the other. The influence 
of her peaceful, often " prettily sentimental" poems of the 
affections belongs to another, though related, chapter of 
American verse, and is mentioned here only to make clear 
the distinction ; imitations of these latter was the peculiar 
merit of Mrs. Sigourney and many Annualists. But her 
Byronic poetry served less for direct imitation than as an 
influence for the imitation of Byron, in fostering his sub- 
jects, moods, methods. Only rarely, as in some slight 
deviation from the regular Spenserian stanza, in some 
phrase or quotation, is she directly imitated. Byron, him- 
self, is the model toward which she drew her admirers. 
With imitations of Don Juan we have an analogy and a 
difference. Halleck's Fanny was contemporaneous with 
Don Juan, and seems to have been only less popular. It 
not only inspired many to imitate its models {Beffo and 
Don Juan), but served itself quite frequently as a model ; 
yet it seems fair to group the imitations of Fanny here 
along with the more patent imitations of Don Juan. Fre- 
quently characteristics of title, plot, satire and stanza are 
after Fanny, but the self-conscious buffoonery, the com- 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 91 

placent irony, the conceited familiarity with gods and men, 
the direct allusions to Byron rather than to Halleck, all 
indicate the dominance of the former. 

An early instance is the Sukey 1 of W. B. Walter — a 
degenerate great grandson of Increase Mather, and (as 
the opening stanza has it) 

" One of those melancholy men, 
Who sometimes like to strike a harp of sadness," 

with whom we have already become so familiar. But 
Sukey 

"was a village girl — an orphan child" — 

who got mixed up with pirates, and came to a tragic end. 
The copy examined had once belonged to Jacob Abbot, 
and his marginal pencilled comments and illustrative draw- 
ings are at least as readable as the text. Walter had 
written : — 

" I never shrink 
From giving my opinion " — 

Abbot comments " no one doubts this." The line on a 

" Solemn glen where peers the place of graves " 

is adorned with a clever caricature of a village church- 
yard. Abbot further points out with mock solemnity some 
curious metamorphoses in the color of Sukey's hair, yel- 
low-brown at the beginning, raven black at the end. 
Walter has (like Halleck) some stanzas of asterisks — the 
commentator writes " Very fine — you are pleased to be 
facetious." Abbot also notes some flagrant thefts from 
John Neal's "Maniac Harper." We may judge, then, 

1 Boston, 1821. 



92 Byron and Byronism in America. 

that, if there were fools who wrote such things, not all 
were fools who read them. Walter's notes, though largely 
taken up with traitorously exposing Lord Byron's " pilfer- 
ings," ape his critical style and opinions. In the same 
year our author published a volume of Byronic lyrics, 
dedicated to Pierpont — which — if we are to believe his 
preface — "contain specimens of the precious and mel- 
ancholy toil of years." He trusted "posterity" would 
" illumine the shrine that consecrates his fame." If pos- 
terity has been busy elsewhere with its candles, his con- 
temporary fame at least was consecrated by a third edition 
of Sukey in Baltimore the same year, and by " the late 
William Crafts," who wrote "Kitty" — with the justification, 
" In New York they have Fanny ; in Boston Sukey ', and 
why should we not have Kitty in Charleston ? " Of Kitty, 
I may say, it was a little better than Sukey. Thus the fol- 
lowing stanza from the former will enable us to judge the 
quality of each : — 

" I love a horseman on a likely horse 
But precious few of these, alas ! there are ; 
I have seen better, but I ne'er saw worse 
For either purpose, whether peace or war. 
'Tis rather strange, since every one is able 
To hire a good one at a livery stable." 1 

The year after Sukey, New York saw a prose dramati- 
zation of Don Juan, 2 in which the Sultana, conquering her 
hopeless passion, generously unites Juan with Haidee, who 
has followed him in male attire. 

1 Mr. Crafts has also borne witness in prose to his studies of Don Juan. He once com- 
mented : "How shall Poetry — the refined companion of the Graces and Virtues, with 
Honor on her brow, Inspiration in her bosom and Immortality in her right hand — palliate 
her abandonment of her high destiny and polluting intercourse with Sin and Infamy? " — 
Quoted by Legare in Sot/them Review for May, 1828. 

2 The Sultana, or a Trip to Turkey. Anon. [Bailey], N.Y., 1822. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 93 

Isaac Starr Classon, author of Horace in New York, 
wrote a continuation of Don Juan? in two cantos, with the 
same manners, morals, opinions, style, and even story, in 
which " her frolic grace Fitz Fulk " succeeds to the indis- 
cretions of Julia and Haidee and the Duke to the indigna- 
tion of Don Alphonso and Lambro ; and though he indulges 
in a good many asterisks, there are some boldly printed 
stanzas almost rivalling the original. He bolsters out his 
notes with cribbings from Byron's — a trick now so familiar 
to us that it is scarcely worth mentioning more ; to the line 

" To give an infant inclination play " 

he comments, " All minors are termed infants in law," just 
as Byron had commented to 

" In law an infant and in years a boy " 

in the Hours of Idleness. A passage on Napoleon is the 
best. 

We sometimes come upon a fusion, or confusion, of Don 
Juan and Childe Harold, as in "The Minstrel Boy" 2 of 
that deaf and dumb prodigy, James Nack, who "had a 
better knowledge of rhyming words than any poet living ; " 
he grafts the moods of the latter on the ottava rimas of the 
former. So, too, in The Lay of the Last Pilgrim? "by 
the author of The Pilgrimage of Ormond," which is in 
Spenserians, but a medley of Childe Harold moods and 
Don Juan familiarity. Here, too, belongs Childe Har- 

1 N.Y., 1825 (second edition). There were several published in England : " The Last 
Canto of the Original Don Juan ," from the papers of the Countess Guiccioli, London, 
18—; Don Juan, Jr., a poem by Byron's ghost, London, 1839; Sequel to Don Juan, Lon- 
don, 1843 (second edition). Fourteen stanzas of Byron's own continuation are now first 
printed in E. Hartley Coleridge's edition. 

2 In The Legend of the Rocks and Other Poems, N.Y., 1827; the title piece is in 
Scott's octosyllabics. 

3 Charleston, S.C., 1832. The title is Byron and Scott. 



94 Byron and Byronism in America. 

vara 1 , 1 "a romance of Cambridge," in four cantos with 
stanzas rhyming ababcc. It was evidently done by a col- 
lege senior of '48, and satirizes rather amusingly Harvard's 
little world of pedants, professors and pupils. Among the 
interspersed songs are burlesques of Longfellow. 2 The 
Ianthe z of Carlos D. Stuart combines in octosyllabics the 
Juan pathetic Haidee episode with the terror and darkness 
of the earlier tales. 

But by far the most marvelous Byronic production has yet 
to be named. It was the Geraldine* of Rufus Dawes, one 
of "that constellation of poets that has lately risen to the 
view of the American people, a constellation that admits a 
mild and lovely light." 5 From the publisher's "Adver- 
tisement" we learn that "the Ms. had been purchased, 
and subscriptions had been taken with flattering success," 
though the plan had been later abandoned. Poe called it 
" most inflated, involved and falsely figurative " — he might 
have added unwittingly burlesque and melodramatic, shame- 
lessly and crudely imitative. There is hardly one popular 
passage of Don Juan or Childe Harold that has not helped 
to furnish out Geraldine ; hardly an idea, a sentiment, 
hardly a phrase, even to the jest 

"thine incomparable oil, Macassar" 6 — 

only the hopeless inanity of the plot and the opinions on 
Byron, as far as they were not characteristic of the times, 

I By Senor Alguno (Nathan Ames), Boston, 1848. 
'-' As " To a Polywog " : — 

"Thou has taught me what a lesson ! — 
That like thee, I too must press on, 
While my bones retain their flesh on, 

Wiggle waggle, waggle wiggle." 

3 N.Y., 1843. 

4 Library of American Poets, N.Y., 1839. 
'"' Knapp, Sketches of Public Characters. 

II i. 17. ' 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 95 

were his own. Byron was " self-abased," and "the prob- 
lem of humanity ; " and Shelley is coupled with him as 

" Without the Palinurus of self-science " 

embarking 

" upon the stormy sea." 

The hero, Waldron, is a bourgeoise Byron, somewhat like 

Neal's Morton — 

" Midst classic lore 
His mind had freely wandered," 



and 
yet 



" Reason he deemed could measure everything," 

"the stir 

And boiling eddies of uncalmed desire 
Buoyed up his swelling breast." 

" And now he recked not but of pleasure's stream." 

Sated he sought new scenes — and the " maelstrom of 
fashion " : — 

" Within the busy vortex Waldron moved 
And drugged his sense of woe." 

Meantime his newly roused love for Miss Geraldine is only 
too deeply shared by one Clifford ; and this emotional com- 
plication produces a chain of circumstances, ending in a 
ball, with Clifford at the bottom of a lake and Waldron on 
his way to join the Corsairs. Geraldine peeks and pines, 
her father takes her South, on the way their ship is attacked 
by Corsairs and wrecked, and Geraldine and her father 
put off on a raft. But some of the Corsairs have got 
astray, too, and are floating about in the longboat, dying 
of thirst and starvation till only one remains. The raft 
and the boat meet, of course, just when 

" The moon is shining full upon the wave." 



96 Byron and Byronism in America. 

Geraldine lies dead in her father's arms, with Waldron's 
picture hanging from her bosom. The sole survivor from 
the longboat 

" wildly flung 
His arms around her with a mad'ning {sic] throw, 
Then plunged within the cold unfathomed deep, 
While sirens sung the victim to his sleep." 

Here the tale ends ; what became of the father we are not 
informed. The author at times tried consciously to be 
facetious — but he builded better than he knew, as this 
mixture of Don Juan and the dime novel may attest. 

Arthur Carryl, 1 by Laughton Osburn, though — or 
rather because — far more respectable, need not detain us, 
except, perhaps, for the observation that, like Willis' 
Lady Jane, it purports to be a novel. 

The Paradise of Fools,"' on the other hand, is strictly a 
literary satire on contemporary America. Though it 
imitates Don Juan, even to the jokes, calling, for example, 
freebooters and pirates fishers of men, 3 the burlesque situ- 
ations remind us more of The Vision of Judgment (as the 
debate over the candidate for admission to the Paradise and 
the dull bard reading his poem aloud before the Court till 
all are prostrated). Of the authors mentioned, Willis un- 
doubtedly fares worst. The candidate is finally refused 
admission — for 

" They said 1 'd have to read what W-ll-s wrote 
. . . . before I could be fit 
Within the Paradise of Fools to sit." 

" And so they sent me back upon a comet 
To earth to study well ' The Lady Jane ' 
And learn to be a perfect ninny from it.*' 

1 N.Y., 1841. 

2 Baltimore, 1841. 

3 Don Juan., ii, 125. 



Byron's Sub-Literary Influence. 97 

It is a comparatively clever jeu d'esprit, whoever the 
author. 

Brief reference may be made to John A. Shea, author 
of " Adolph," 1 the character of which may be judged from 
the opening lines : — 

"Well truth is strange, aye even than fiction stranger." 2 

George Rogers, 3 a renegade Englishman, celebrated Wash- 
ington in one hundred and sixty-four pages, the dignity of 
his theme putting a curb on frivolity, but not preventing 
excursions into contemporary politics, and the inevitable 
imitation of the famous " "Tis sweet." We have also Guad- 
alowpe* " a tale of love and war," based on incidents of the 
Mexican war, with much familiar digression, its anonymous 
author going out of his way to villify Wellington, appar- 
ently merely because Byron had done so. The Diitch 
Pilgrim Fathers? by Edward Hopper, in ottava rima, in 
intent comic rather than satiric ; and The Vision of Judg- 
ment* which describes some obscure church-squabbles 
in three cantos of very close imitation, often verbatim 
copying, of Byron's Vision, may close the list. 

Legare had remarked long since, 7 "Lord Byron with 
his Beppos and Juans has done infinite mischief in the 
rhyming world. Nothing is so easy as to rival the noble- 
poet in his slip-shod, zig-zag, desultory style, and dog- 
gerel versification, but nothing is more difficult than to 
pour out with such perfect nonchalance strains of the most 

1 In Poems, N.Y., 1846. 

2 Cf. Don Juan, xiv, 101. 

3 In Democratic Vistas, N.Y., 1849. 

4 Philadelphia, 1860. 
" N.Y., 1865. 

6 R. W. Wright, N.Y., 1867. 

7 In reviewing Craft's Writings in the Southern Review, 1829. 



98 Byron and Byronism in America. 

beautiful poetry and sallies of incomparable wit. The 
humor of a man of genius, however eccentric and even 
extravagant, is one thing, and the buffoonery of an awk- 
ward imitator quite another." 

When Byron's influence waned, the same change of 
model is, of course, to be noticed as specified in the last 
two chapters. The situation at the turn of the sixties, or 
thereabouts, is capitally portrayed in Holmes' Guardian 
Angel : — " He [Gifted Hopkins] retired pensive from this 
interview, and flinging himself at his desk, attempted 
wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the lan- 
guage of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric 
which he began thus : — 

'another's ! 
Another's! O the pang, the smart! 
Fate owes to love a deathless grudge — 
The barbed fang has rent a heart 

which — which — 
Judge — judge, no, not judge — budge, drugge, fudge ! — 
. . . . all up for to-night ! ' 



. . . . ' O no, Mr. Hopkins, pray go on,' [he is reading 
his verses] said Clement, 'I'm very fond of poetry.' The 
poet did not require much urging, and recited : — 

' She moves in splendor like the ray 
That flashes from unclouded skies, 
And all the charm of night and day 
Are mingled in her hair and eyes ! ' 

Clement .... said the stanzas reminded him forcibly of 
one of the greatest poets of the century. Gifted, flushed 
hot with pleasure . . . . ' Perhaps you will like these 
lines still better .... the style is more modern : — 



By r oris Sub- Literary Influence. 99 

' O daughter of the spiced South ! 
Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine 
That stained with its hue divine 
The red flower of thy perfect mouth ' — 

and so on through a series of stanzas like these with the 
pulp of two rhymes between the upper and the lower crust 
of two others." Gifted Hopkins, as we have seen, was 
drawn from life. 1 

1 But a quotation from Goodrich's Recollections opened this chronicle, and it is fit- 
ting that another should conclude it : " At the present day the flood of license is sub- 
siding. Byron is still read, but his immoralities, his atheism, have lost their relish, and 
are now deemed offenses and blemishes, and at the same time the public taste is direct- 
ing itself in favor of a purer and more exalted moral tone Longfellow, Bryant 

and Tennyson, are the exponents of the public taste in poetry, and Hawthorne, Dickens, 
Thackeray in romance." 



CHAPTER VI. 

BYRON IN AMERICAN CRITICISM. -Some Explanation 
of Byron's American Vogue. — Conclusion. 

SUCH in brief is the chronicle of Byronic verse in 
America. Were it to be brought down to the present 
day, very few names of sub-literary writers such as have 
just been dealt with, and only one name, Joaquin Miller, 
of equal rank with those earlier writers grouped under 
Chapter III, could be added. With the diffusion of a 
relatively higher culture at home, and the rise of new 
poetic tastes in England, the vogue of Byron had passed, 
and that, too, before the appearance of Mrs. Stowe's 
charges, which in popular thought are supposed to have 
been instrumental in checking it. Joaquin Miller is the 
only American poet, except Halleck, who has loved Byron 
romantically without silliness. Out in the bay of San 
Francisco, " forever green in its crown of California laurel, 
the fairest hands of the youngest and fairest city of the 
New World wove a wreath of bay for the tomb of Byron," 
which the following days Miller " brought over the Rocky 
Mountains, and the seas and placed above the dust of the 
soldier-poet." 1 He is almost the only American poet, ex- 
cept Halleck, who has been inspired by Byron to genuine 
poetic achievement. His Calif or man? an Indian tale of 
revenge, is a wild gorgeous Giaour of the Sierras. But 
Miller stands somewhat apart from the movement we have 
been tracing. 

1 Prefatory note to the poem " Burns and Byron," Songs of the Sierras, 1871. 

2 Songs of the Sierras. 



Byron in American Criticism. 101 

From the verse which records this movement, it may be 
said in summary, we have seen the influence of Byron's 
personality, opinions and poetry upon a somewhat unso- 
phisticated and crude people. 1 We have seen the Byron 
collar, the mysterious mien, imitated in person or on paper ; 
we have read pessimistic views of life ; we have seen his 
elements of poetic matter, the literary satire of The Eng- 
lish Bards, the wild adventures of the tales, the nature and 
history of Childe Harold, the solemn isolation and com- 
munion of Manfred, the love and despair of the lyrics, the 
social satire and wit of Don Juan — we have seen all these 
imitated with also an even more pronounced imitation of the 
elements of poetic manner, the rhythms, the rhymes, the 
stanzas, the general form and even scattered phrases. In 
some of this verse we have read, too, the views of the op- 
position, with direct testimony that Byron was occupying 
a deal of attention. In Chapter II, touching Byron in the 
newspapers and magazines to the time of his death, and 
in occasional quotations and foot-notes of the succeeding 
chapters, the reader will have noticed also some prose 
criticism ; there still remains, however, somewhat to be re- 
ported under this head. 

I. 

Byron's death occasioned much serious criticism, which 
continued for two or three years thereafter. The publi- 
cation of Moore's Life and Letters in 1830-1 occasioned 
Macaulay's brilliant essay in England, and in America at 

1 The crudity of American intellectual life has been frequently referred to in these 
pages, and is too well known to need further proof. Yet as a work of supererogation 1 may 
transcribe another word from Goodrich, who was in his day with Griswold in the forefront 
of American intellectual enterprise. He gives in his Recollections elaborate statistics to 
show the increase in school-books, from an aggregate of $2,500,000 in 1820, to $12,500,000 in 
1850, and adds triumphantly, "Then, I ask, have we not a literature? " " We produce an- 
nually more school-books than the whole continent of Europe." Goodrich has recorded also 
his impressions of a visit to Rome : — " The Forum, the Palace of the Caesars, the Coliseum, 
the Baths of Caracalla .... display the actual poverty of art, for there is not one of them 
that can furnish a useful suggestion to even a house-carpenter .... the aqueducts .... 
look like lines of marching mastadons." This was innocence abroad, indeed. 



102 Byron and Byronism in America. 

least one critique of first-rate ability, that of Legare. Lady 
Byron's death and Mrs. Stowe's "vindication" renewed 
the old discussion of Byron's character, but resulted in 
nothing, I believe, on his writings, except disputes as to 
the interpretation of some passages of supposed self-con- 
fession. Byron's centenary 1 yielded a rather cold essay 
by Professor Woodberry, and since 1898, the volumes of 
Henley and of Prothero and Coleridge have called forth 
the essays of Mr. More and Professor Trent, already re- 
ferred to. 2 

The first extended discussion of Byron's completed 
achievement appeared, as before stated, in the North 
American Review, shortly after his death. A few months 
later appeared there a discussion, still more extended, 
which was immediately honored with republication in 
England to serve as an antidote to the evil spirit of Byron- 
ism. It was written by Andrews Norton, and remains to 
this day among the more independent and profitable, 
though less known, studies on the poet. Norton was very 
conservative. As a clergyman, he condemned, naturally 
enough, the immorality and irreligion both of Byron's life 
and of his writings ; and stripped off the often all too un- 
real romance from his sorrows, doubting not, however, 
that he suffered from a gloomy temperament and from the 
depressing physical effect of his vices, but this was, on 
the whole, " a vulgar misery ; " even his espousal of the 
Greek cause was "theatrical." The critic denied the 
ideality of Byron's great poetry: "It is the poetry of 
earth only where it is not, as in Cain, the poetry of hell." 

1 Scott's centenary was celebrated in Boston with tributes from Holmes and Emerson. 

2 Professor Biilbring of Bonn told me the renewed interest in Byron in Germany Uni- 
versity circles was due chiefly to the wealth of scholarly material in the edition of Prothero 
and Coleridge. Quite noticeable is the large number of German dissertations for the doc- 
torate on Byron during the last five years. 



Byron in American Criticism. 103 

This poem, with Don Juan, was "a course of writing 
which left nothing to be hoped." Norton was utterly 
oblivious of the deep spiritual doubts and splendid imagi- 
nation of Cain, which made it on the one hand great liter- 
ature, and on the other great poetry ; in Don Juan he saw, 
like Southey, only ribaldry, buffoonery and blasphemy 
against God and man, but felt not, as did such a healthy 
spirit as Scott, its abundance of observation and experi- 
ence, its understanding of the weaker sides of humanity, 
its sublime irony, its jovial laughter, its wealth of lan- 
guage, its gayety, its pathos, its command of all moods, 
which make it, too, great literature and great poetry. In 
fact, Don Juan has seldom been understood by English- 
speaking critics. Byron's popularity he assigned — and 
in part justly — to his being en rapport with his times. In 
such observations there was nothing unusual or extra- 
ordinary ; but Norton undertook a purely aesthetic judg- 
ment, which yielded an almost equally negative result. 
Because Byron, the man, he contended, had no fixed prin- 
ciples of belief or of action, Byron, the poet, was not 
"in real harmony of mind with the works of nature ; " his 
artistic defects sprang in the main from an unsound moral 
fibre ; : thus much of his most admired work was forced 
exaggeration and "factitious sentiment;" he was success- 
ful and sincere only when describing moods of nature, 
gloomy like himself, where " his intense egotism made him 
a poet." Some passages in Childe Harold are examined 
in detail from this standpoint. Norton is subtle ; and many 
thoughtful persons, who hold that great art is only possible 
with great character, would agree with him, without stop- 
ping to examine where his subtlety leads to the exploiting 

1 He anticipates the more brilliant utterance of Cardinal Newman, who in his Essay on 
Poetry, applies the same reasoning to the same poet. 



104 Byron and Byronism in America. 

of mere idiosyncracies of taste, or involves a failure to 
perceive that the momentary heat of imagination and emo- 
tion in a creative genius is itself sincerity. 

Hugh Swinton Legare, one of the most, perhaps the 
most, accomplished of Southern gentlemen 1 before the 
Civil War, published two extensive articles in his Southern 
Review? as the two volumes by Moore were reprinted In 
America, on " Byron's Character and Writings." In those 
days Byron, the man, offered the critic as many, if not 
more interesting, problems as Byron, the poet. Legare, 
with the chivalry of his race, defended Byron's mother and 
wife, and condemned the poet as most unfilial and unux- 
orious. He contrasted Byron with Scott: — " Never did 
two such men — competitors in the highest walks of cre- 
ative imagination and deep pathos — present such a strange 
antithesis of moral character, domestic habits and pursuits, 
as Walter Scott at home and Lord Byron abroad." Of 
Don Juan he remarked : — "In writing Don Juan Byron 
renounced — renounced with foul scorn and beyond all 
hope of recovery — the sympathies of mankind .... the 
wanton, gross and often dull and feeble ribaldry of some 
of his latest productions, broke the spell which he had laid 
upon our souls." Here the Southern litterateur and the 
New England clergyman are strangely in accord. The 
spell had controlled Legare "less than two lustres ago," 
and then Legare " could never think of him but as an 
ideal being." It is hard for us to realize to-day with what 
a shock of disenchantment Don Juan affected the more 
idealistic of Byron's admirers ; they felt as if they had 
been grievously imposed upon, and cheated of their gen- 
erous enthusiasm and sympathy. 3 Legare found the main- 

1 For Poe was hardly a Southerner, and Simnis was not notably accomplished. 

2 See Writings of Legare\ 2 vols., Charleston, 1845. 

3 See even the Edinburgh Review, especially the first article on Don Juan. 



Byron in American Criticism. 105 

spring of Byron's character and writings to have been 
debellare superbos, and his chief peculiarity — he does not 
say defect — as a poet, in his similes: "Instead of draw- 
ing his similes from the natural world to the moral, as the 
ancients uniformly did, he does just the reverse. Thus a 
'lake' is 'calm as cherished hate,' Zuleika was 'soft as 
the memory of buried love.'" .... "Manfred as a 
whole is his masterpiece." 

Rev. W. B. O. Peabody reviewed Moore in the North 
American Review? but voiced only current opinions. He 
reprehended Moore for linking unhappiness and genius 
together ; Byron's moral defects could not be palliated on 
that score. The tales were "shocking to probability;" 
and "Ckilde Harold was his most important work, and on 
this and his lyrical poems his fame must ultimately de- 
pend." There is no mention of Don Juan. Peabody, in 
another article in the North American Review 2 on " Eng- 
lish Poetry in the Nineteenth Century," thought "the 
perversion of B3 T ron's genius scarcely inferior to that of 
his moral powers." 

E. P. Whipple discussed "The Characteristics of Lord 
Byron" in the same Review for 1845. Byron was "the 
mouthpiece of the harsher revolutionary spirit of the time : " 
and a man of whom "it may almost be said he had no 
character at all." Whipple also entirely misunderstood 
Don Juan, and in rebuking "the scoffing demon of his 
wit" he quoted the whimsical and charming verses (ii, 144) 
where Haidee leaning over young Juan in the cave, 

" drew out her provisions from the basket '* ; 

as degrading to poetry. 

1 See Literary Remains, Boston, 1850. 
- Vol. I, p. 494. 
3 ii., 144. 



106 Byron and Byronism in America. 

" Byron and his Contemporaries," by H. J. Brent, in 
his National Magazine for 1839, illustrates the fulsome 
and undiscerning adulation of some minor critics. It was 
Byron's romantic life that appealed most to him, and he 
sided with Byron against his wife and the public. The 
criticism of his poetry is askew. He calls, as some Ger- 
man philologians have called, Childe Harold an epic, and 
says " Byron is classical — all his poetry is of the Grecian 
order — it is the verse that we might suppose some Athe- 
nian of the Platonic era would have written beneath the 
groves of Academe." There was a classical element in 
Byron's imagination, in the distinctness of his metaphors 
and in the simplicity and scope of his designs, but Mr. 
Brent evidently meant something very different. And 
wishing to compare Byron with the world's greatest painter 
he hit on — Salvator Rosa. 

In The Mirror for 1837, another minor critic, William 
Cox, taking offense at some strictures "in a few back 
numbers " of that once popular journal, defended Byron 
against "the charges usually brought against his poetry, 
on three counts : " firstly, his skepticism was not proselyt- 
ing ; secondly, his licentiousness was confined to Don 
Juan, and never as atrocious as a certain scene in the 
highly respected Seasons; and thirdly, his disreputable 
heroes always come to a bad end. 

The Transcendentalists would none of Byron ; Emerson 
in the Preface to Parnassus, half admiring a rhyming 
facility which he possessed not himself, conceived Byron's 
lack of any aim a fundamental limitation. Margaret Ful- 
ler believed "his poems have done their work, and are 
beginning to find their proper level .... posterity will 
assign him an obscure place." Wordsworth, to whom she 
gives the most space in her list of poetic judgments, was 



Byron in American Criticism. 107 

"the greatest poet of the day." 1 That the serene singer 
of the inner life and the light that never was on sea or 
land should have spoken more intelligibly and beautifully 
to this band of high, quiet souls, living with the Immanent 
on New England hills and meadows, than the passionate 
spirit crying in the night for a light beyond him, or pass- 
ing feverishly over old cities of ruin and modern society, 
with its complex contradictions of high and low, was, of 
course, only inevitable. 

Yet if, according to Margaret Fuller, Byron's poems 
were finding " their proper level," according to Henry T. 
Tuckerman, about the same time, " Three thousand copies 
of Byron's poems were sold annually in this country." 
Tuckerman's essay 2 is characterized by sense and insight. 
The analysis of Byron's character, his foibles, his vices, 
his inconsistencies, his generosity, his frankness, the part 
played by heredity and environment, while not profound, 
marks a change in the critical spirit. He saw truly that 
" there is a vast deal of cant in much that is said of the 
moral perversion of the poet," and strove to counteract it. 
Of Byron's poetry he wrote, it seems with some degree of 
originality and truth : — " Byron represents an actual phase 
of the soul's life ; not its whole nor its highest experience, 
but still a real and most interesting portion of its develop- 
ment In many a youthful heart do his truest 

appeals find an immediate response How much of 

lofty promise in the very discontent he utters .... how 
often does it reveal an infinite necessity for love, an eternal 
tendency to progress .... and the eloquent complaints 
of Byron have brought home to countless hearts a deeper 
conviction of the absolute need of truth and self-respect 

1 Papers on Literattire and Art, London, 1846. 

2 In Thoughts on the Poets, London, 1850. 



108 Byron and Byronism in America. 

than any logical argument If a few shallow imitators 

are silly enough to turn down their collars and drink gin, 
there is another class who mentally exclaim as they read 
Byron — 'What infinite longings are these, what sensi- 
bility to beauty, what capacities of suffering ! " 

Later criticism has dealt more and more leniently with By- 
ron's woeful shortcomings as a man, or sunk them altogether 
in a consideration of his poetry. Again, the " atheism" in 
his poetry — about as real as that of The Book of Job — and 
its immoralities, which cannot be so easily defended, have 
long since ceased to be an important issue with critics. 

But in no American criticism, except in the brief and 
crude observations of Goodrich, is there any attempt to 
explain Byron's vogue in America, as in any way of the 
country and not altogether of the age. It is doubtful if 
even an acute observer could then have seen our literary 
conditions in the broad way to-day quite possible even to 
the most ordinary mind acquainted with the facts. There 
were many in those days who realized "the difficulties of a 
national literature : " the need of copyright, the provincial 
reverence for any English book, however mean, the lack of 
an intellectual centre like London or Paris, the incompe- 
tence of minor criticism and the American versatility, which 
conceived itself, because apt in politics, stump-speaking, 
carpentry, plumbing, boat-making, distilling and extem- 
pore praying, therefore equally apt to "turn off in 
leisure moments " an Indian Epic of six cantos after Scott 
or Byron, a quarto of songs like Moore's, or a string of 
Byronic Spenserians. 1 Edward Everett, Verplanck, Hal- 

1 This complacent versatility was most crude in the West, which by the forties was as 
much irritated Dy the relative superiority of what it was pleased to call " The cheap Atlan- 
tic retailers in literature" (Western Monthly Magazine) , as the East had been irritated, 
scarcely a generation before, by the infinite superiority of what it was sometimes pleased to 
call "the loathsome filth of Scotch reviewers" and "Lord Byron's mercenary critics." 
This Western Monthly Magazine (Louisville and Cincinnati) proclaimed in the April num- 
ber of 1837, " Notwithstanding the devotion of Ohio to pork, railroads and banks, and of 
Kentucky to tobacco, hemp and stock, we are doing a pretty fair business out here in the 
literary line." 



Byron in American Criticism. 109 

leek, Bryant, Longfellow, Timothy Flint, Willis, Cornelius 
Mathews, Poe, and many another reiterated these limita- 
tions again and again. But the more far-reaching limita- 
tions, the defective imaginative background of a long past, 
colored rich with multifarious life on coast and plain and 
mountain, the defective national experience, the only just 
born national character, and the natural absorption of the 
energies of a new people of a new land in felling forests, 
in laying out acres, in building wharves and warehouses, 
have been, I believe, first realized and formulated since 
they have been to some degree overcome. So with the 
vogue of Byron. Critics seem to have seen in it no more 
than the spirit of the times and the silliness of mankind. 
To-day, when one has followed it down two generations, 
when one has followed too, the obscure ins and outs of 
thousands of old newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, 
and hundreds of old books in prose and verse, recording 
the general intellectual conditions, one can judge with 
more discrimination. 

II. 

Yet one must not forget or disregard the universal in 
time or in humanity for the sake of establishing a particu- 
lar thesis. Byron's vogue had much in common, as al- 
ready admitted, with his vogue elsewhere ; it is, indeed, in 
part to be explained on the one hand by the spirit of those 
times which were restless, stormy and gloomy, and on the 
other by the silliness of humanity which in every age will 
imitate a great leader, especially when there are in him 
the attractions of beauty and romance, or any suggestion 
of eccentricity. 1 

1 Did not the silly Roman advocates walk about the Forum with necks awry, because 
Cicero's wen made Cicero walk so? And have not most German officers and German corps 
students to-day an " es-ist-erreicht " moustache because the Kaiser has chosen to wear one? 



no Byron and Byronism in America. 

The spirit of the times on the Continent, to some extent 
in England, was, as before observed, quite the reverse of 
that in America. Yet America, though herself in the very 
era of new-found strength and good feeling, was keenly 
alive to Continental thought ; and something of the Conti- 
nental mood tinged her intellectual life. The French 
Revolution had its American supporters, and there was a 
bond of union in Lafayette ; French infidelity — one needs 
but to recall Thomas Paine — had spread among us, and 
even in such a staid institution as Yale, under the staid 
Timothy Dwight, existed free-thinking societies whose 
members abandoned their own Christian names to mas- 
querade about the campus as Diderots and Voltaires ; the 
Napoleonic wars were duly reported in the papers ; Na- 
poleon had his American enemies and his champions, as 
the readers of John S. C. Abbot well know; the Greek 
struggle occupied Daniel Webster in the Senate. Though 
America could not feel with the living experience of France, 
Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Byron as an incarna- 
tion of the Time-Spirit {Zeitgeist) could not in consequence 
be an inspiration to any sincere American poet, living the 
life of his country, yet America possessed fully and under- 
stood not unsympathetically the main facts necessary to 
the interpretation of this Byron of the Time-Spirit. 

And the vogue of Byron in America depended in some 
measure also on the same literary conditions as in England. 
The literary past of England was, as we have seen, the 
literary possession of America. Byron's contemporary 
success and fame in England, as opposed to the contempo- 
rary failure and obscurity of Wordsworth and Keats, lay 
not a little in his literary conservatism. He is much less 
revolutionary than is popularly supposed. He followed 
directly on Gifford in literary satire ; he adopted the Spen- 



Explanation of Byroris Vogue. in 

serian of Beattie 1 and Campbell and the octosyllabics of 
Scott. The melancholy had traits in common with that 
of the "Grave-Yard School," and sadness had been 
cultivated by the Sentimentalists : his mysterious heroes 
with much of their equipage were already fore-shad- 
owed in the Tales of Horror of Radcliffe, Lewis, and 
Maturin ; his didacticism was far more in the spirit of the 
past than of the future ; something of his nature mood was 
already familiar in Rosseau and Chateaubriand ; and his 
irreligion never shook itself quite free from Calvinism. 
His Don Juan was in part a parody on the styles of poet- 
ry he had himself made only more popular ; and it was 
written in a verse for which the public had just been prepared 
by Frere's " Whistlecrafts." Yet only the most superficial 
judgment could deny Byron creative power on this score, 
nor was his poetry merely the fostering of fashions. He 
stood to the lyric poetry of his age — employing the word 
in its broadest sense for all subjective poetry — as Shake- 
speare had stood to the dramatic poetry of Elizabethan 
times. It may be that the greatest poets always make in 
this way increment of the past and present. What of new 
he added was that inexpressible something pre-eminent 
which made it possible for him to crystalize into poetry, 
not only the spirit of the times in life and politics, but its 
spirit in literature as well. But this point is touched on 
not to eulogize Byron, rather to point out its significance 
for America. Our fathers had the literary key to Byron, 
at a time, when, as in England, Wordsworth was caviare 
to the general and critic alike, and Keats was a cockney- 
mannikin, and neither would ever do. 

These facts aside, the silliness of humanity must have 
been one factor, if not in the admiration, at least in the 

1 Childe Harold, i-ii, has some marked similarities with The Minstrel. 



ii2 Byron and Byronism in America. 

imitation of Byron. For that many good people could 
read poetry with more intellect and feeling than they 
could write it, and that the intensity of Byron's real spell 
cannot be measured by the flabbiness of most imitators, 
it can be taken for granted. But let us look a little 
closer. 

Scientific certainty is almost impossible in the literary 
biography of an individual ; much more so in a chapter, 
however brief and simple, in the literary biography of a 
nation. It is even impossible to determine surely in what 
section of the country or at what date Byron was most pop- 
ular. Authors writing in one place seem frequently to 
have published in quite another, and the date of publica- 
tion may not have corresponded by a decade or so to the 
date of composition. Possibly, gloomy moralizings in Spen- 
serians predominated in New England, ftseudo Don Juans 
in and about New York, literary satire in Philadelphia, 
tales in the West and South ; this would correspond, more- 
over, fairly to the peculiarities of the respective districts. 
After Byron's death, when the furore manifestly subsided, 
the dates of Halleck's edition (1835-7) ma y denote the 
high-water mark of popularity. Still more when dealing 
with causes must one rely on impression and insight. 
Byron's effect on America may perhaps be best understood 
with reference to his well-known effect on the young. 
What is meant by this, a moment's reflection will make 
clear. 

The ethical sense of the individual precedes in develop- 
ment the aesthetic sense ; the boy admires high words and 
deeds, and the ringing verse that has moral strength, 
rather than sensuous beauty ; he admires, in other words, 
the biography and history of great achievement, loathes the 
base, and sympathizes with defeat and ruin. And his lit- 



Explanation of Byron 's Vogue. 113 

erary delight is eloquence — always in its essence ethical. 
He can recite with power "The Isles of Greece ; " but he 
can see nothing in " An Ode on a Grecian Urn." More- 
over, his ethical ideals are grand rather than subtle or 
simple. America before the Civil War, with her Wash- 
ington, her Declaration of Independence and the moral 
foundations of the Republic forever in her mind's eye, 
with her race of orators in the Senate, in the House, in the 
pulpit and on the village green, with her frame school- 
houses and shabby board walks, with her Ionic porticos of 
granite or gray-sanded wooden props, had a far higher 
ethical than aesthetic life. Now, Byron, more than any 
contemporary, had the grand, eloquent ethical note. 

And just as the young by that temporary perversion of 
the moral life, which is almost sure to follow awakened 
self-consciousness, find something manly in swearing or 
smoking a cigarette, so at times, it seems, the unsophisti- 
cated American of the earlier days found something pecul- 
iarly fascinating in Byron's perversities. Yet it may be 
apropos here to remark that the sexual immoralit}Mn Byron's 
poetry is not at all the prime source of his effect on youth. 
It serves to stimulate curiosity, especially if the school- 
ma'am sounds a warning ; but the real fascination, if the 
explanation I am here giving be correct, is quite different. 
Nor was it an important source either of his earlier popu- 
larity or of his later decline in America. 

Just as the young have a romantic craving for what is 
most remote from their own experience, be it for daggers, 
murders, pirates, treasure-trove, cowboys or castles ; so 
America, inexperienced and prosaic in spite of explora- 
tions, settlements, Rocky Mountains, a war or two and a 
beautiful banner in the blue sky, seems to have felt a 
peculiar charm in the East, and in the bizarre performances 



1 14 Byron and Byronism in America. 

of Byron's heroes and of Byron himself, even as to this 
day her religious bodies are more interested in foreign 
than in domestic missions. 

Again, the boy is undoubtedly drawn to Byron not a 
little by the force and sweep and untrained will of his 
utterance ; Byron had the rapidity and the recklessness 
which the reading boy often most delights in, as voicing 
himself. It may not be a mere fanciful analogy to sug- 
gest that this element in Byron may have had a peculiar 
power over the force and sweep and untrained will of the 
young nation. But this must not be confused with the 
Titanic power of his revolt and "impatient democracy" 
over contemporary nations and conditions in Europe. 

These brief considerations concern in part simply the 
readers of Byron. He made imitators also by his appeal 
to self-consciousness. The normal boy feels a kinship 
with Byron's greater spirit, with Byron's aggressive egotism 
and pride, and often with his melancholy and revolt ; not 
because of deep conflicts and afflictions in real life, but 
because he is in the confused transitional stage between 
existence as a matter of course and his own existence, half 
recognized as personality. He is over-conscious of him- 
self, and blushes when his mother introduces him to the 
new minister. He reads Byron (in secret) and, if he be 
ambitious and conceited, two traits presumably at their 
acme in this period of his life, he will imitate Byron. 
Most of our imitators, though elder in years, were, as 
writers, in this self-conscious state. They were conceited 
in provincial inexperience, and ambitious to achieve be- 
yond their power ; while the country at large was in the 
most self-conscious period of its development (as shown 
not more by its boastfulness than by its sensitiveness to 
criticism and by the general decision in favor of a national 



Explanation of Byron's Vogue. 115 

literature). Byron, not only the great exponent of per- 
sonality, but the most self-conscious, was thus, the one 
contemporary English poet — as before hinted but as now 
quite manifest by virtue of the verse we have just left behind 
us — most attractive as a model when literary perfection 
was still quite generally aimed at by copying English poets. 
Another reason, so obvious that one is in danger of 
missing it altogether, is this : the very obviousness of 
Byron himself. Excepting passages in Childe Harold, iii 
and iv, Byron is one of the most intelligible and straight- 
forward of poets. Subjective poetry, broadly speaking, is 
either symbolic or direct. A subjective poet may express 
himself, his moods or opinions, in terms of dramatic 
monologue, as at times did Browning, or through some 
aspect of nature, as did Shelley in " The Cloud," and the 
" Ode to the West Wind." But Byron spoke in his own 
person. He was often so controlled by the emotions 
that seized him that, as in the " Fare Thee Well," the pas- 
sionate but unadorned statement of immediate fact was 
sufficient to poetry. If this be a fault of relative mediocrity, 
others may decide ; it was, at all events, a snare and a 
delusion for his imitators. Such work looks so simple — 
a pen and paper and presto ! — a Byronic lyric, just as clear 
and as well rhymed (on comparison) as any of Byron's. 
Even the most callow imitator of Keat's " Ode on a Grecian 
Urn " cannot but see or feel that he has missed the color 
and delicacy of his model ; but only a mature mind pos- 
sesses the spiritual balance and insight to distinguish, in 
the issue, between what is simple, direct and vital and 
what is but jejune imitation, especially if the latter hap- 
pens to be its own production. The real mastercraft in 
the nonchalant ease and colloquiality of Don Juan was 
in the same way, as observed by Legare, all too little ap- 



n6 Byron and Byronism in America. 

predated. Then, too, Byron is himself often slip-shod 
and crude, and many undoubtedly supposed, like any boy- 
ish imitator at his desk to-day, that, because they could suc- 
ceed in copying Byron's defects, they had rivalled his 
merits. 

Byron's relation to the then current homely sentimental 
verse of which "The Old Oaken Bucket" is typical, and 
to the equally current " prettily sentimental " with its con- 
ventional "Lines on Baby's Pink Slippers," " Stanzas to 
a Lady in the Casement, Plucking Honeysuckle," etc., 
it is hard to determine. Such verse corresponds directly 
to nothing in Byron, to little in Moore ; yet the influence 
of both may be suspected, and, as Byron was the more 
dominant spirit, his influence may have been the more 
fundamental, and similar to that which he exercised, ac- 
cording to the critic, 1 on the English lady L. E.L., namely, 
in heightening "the romantic tone and native sentimen- 
tality." It is the sentimentality of the era of Byron without 
its masculine vigor and largeness, trivialized by poverty 
of imagination and that self-conscious straining after un- 
usual poetic themes which so often goes with it. Wordsworth 
undoubtedly influenced many in the choice of homely 
themes, and some of Woodworth's songs were once popu- 
larly attributed to Wordsworth ; 2 Mrs. Hemans and L.E.L. 
influenced many in the choice of " pretty" ones. This phase 
of our verse is, however, a topic for special investigation. 

Byron's position in America to-day was referred to in 
the opening paragraph. A reaction from extraordinary 
and somewhat meretricious fame has brought to the poet 
years of extraordinary and decidedly irrational neglect 

1 George Saintsbury in History of Nineteenth Century Literature. 

2 " From the newspapers of England they were recopied in the United States as the pro- 
ductions of the great lake poet." Introduction to The Poems of Samuel Woodworth, 2 
vols., N.Y., 1861, edited by his son. 



Conclusion. 117 

among those who speak his land's language. The Caro- 
linian Age of the Restoration, with its ideals of good 
breeding and correct taste in literature, did not always 
understand the infinite variety and power of Shakespeare ; 
the latter Victorian Age, in both England and America, 
with its ideals of sensuous beauty and artistic finish or 
spiritual suggestiveness in literature, has refused always 
to understand the infinite personality and power of Byron. 
If Byron was once a fad, anti-Byron is somewhat a fad 
to-day. To admire Byron to-day argues a coarse insensi- 
bility to the fine lines, to the delicate lights and shadows, 
to the overtones of poetry, or to the deep spiritual problems 
which Jin (or enjin) de siecle poetry settles or illuminates. 
Byron is a barbarian who uses bad grammar and makes 
hobbling iambics ; Byron has no philosophy ; Byron is a 
poet for lawyers and bartenders. This is very like the 
cant that has been so summary with his morals and irre- 
ligion. Whether there be as many single lines of ultimate 
poetic charm in Byron as in Keats or Tennyson, or whether 
his philosophy of life l be as profound and as satisfying as 
Wordsworth's or Browning's may be doubted ; but Byron 
recorded — and recorded to the full — fifteen years of one 
of the most intense in passion and in thought of all human 
lives, a life lived in a tremendous epoch, near the world's 
noblest mountains and streams, in the midst of her fairest 
cities, a life echoing in its depths the x a 'P e <£^ s ' °f the Greek 
and the me/ir Licht! of the German : let us keep the record. 

1 This has been carefully examined. See Lord Byron's Weltanschauung, J. O. E. 
Donner, Helsingfors, 1897. 



APPENDIX 



The earlier American editions of Byron, in the libraries 
consulted, are given in the following list : 1 

1811, English Bards, 2 Charleston, S.C. 1812, Childe Harold, 
i-ii, Phil. 1 8 13, Giaour, Phil. 18 13, Giaour, Boston. 18 14, 
Bride of Abydos, Boston. 181 4, Bride of Abydos, Phil. 18 14, 
Corsair, N.Y. 18 14, Corsair, Phil. 18 14, Corsair, Boston. 18 14, 
Lara, Boston. 18 14, Lara, N.Y. 181 4, Ode to Napoleon, Boston. 
1814, Ode to Napoleon, N.Y. 1814, Ode to Napoleon, Phil. 
18 1 4, English Bards (with Ode to Napoleon), Boston. 18 14, 3 
Works (2 vs.) 4 , Boston. 1815, Hebrew Melodies, Boston. 1815, 
Hebrew Melodies, N.Y. 1815, Hebrew Melodies, Phil. 1815, 
Curse of Minerva. 5 Phil. 18 16, Siege of Corinth and Parisina, 
N.Y. 18 16, Ode on the Star of the Legion of Honor and Other 
Poems, N.Y. 18 16, Farewell to England with Other Poems (in- 
cluding Curse of Minerva), Phil. 1816, Works (3 vs.), Phil. 1817, 
Manfred, N.Y. 181 7, Childe Harold, iii, Boston. 18x7, Childe 
Harold, iii (with Prisoner of Chillon, Darkness, etc.), N.Y. 1817, 
Works, N.Y. [1S17, Pilgrimage to the Holy Land with the Tem- 
pest, a fragment, Phil.]. 6 1818, Childe Harold, iv, N.Y. 1818, 
Childe Harold, iv, Phil. 18 19, Mazeppa (with Ode to Venice), 
Boston. 1820, Works (not complete to date), Phil. 182 1, Don 

1 I must acknowledge indebtedness for the lists kindly sent me by Miss A. S. Mazyck, 
assistant in the Charleston Library, by Mr. John Thompson, Mr. N. D. Hodges and Mr. 
H. L. Koopman, librarians respectively of Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Brown University, 
and by Mr. A. P. C Griffin, Chief Bibliographer of the Library of Congress, Washington. 

2 First American from the third London edition. 

3 Note how remarkably Byron's London " year of revelry " and glory, 1814, affected 
American publishers. 

4 " From the London edition," and not collected by American enterprise. 

B De Silver & Co., 3°. Before publication in England, whether with or without Byron's 
consent is not known. [?] 

6 Spurious, published by the well known house of M. Thomas. 



120 Appendix. 

Juan, iii, iv, v, N.Y. 182 1, Marino Faliero, Phil. 182 1, Prophecy 
of Dante, Phil. 182 1, La Profezia di Dante, 1 N.Y. 182 1. Works 
(4 vs.), N.Y. 1822, Sardanapalus, Two Foscari, Cain, Bos- 
ton. 1822, Sardanapalus, Two Foscari, N.Y. 1822, Cain, N.Y. 

1823, Island, N.Y. 1823, Vision of Judgment (with Southey's). 
N.Y. 1823, Werner, Phil. 1823, Don Juan, ix-xi, Albany. 1824, 
Don Juan, xv-xvi, Phil. 1824, Deformed Transformed, Phil. 

1824, Works (8 vs.), 2 Phil. 1825, Works (8 vs.), Phil. 1825, 
Correspondence (earlier letters), Phil. 1825, Don Juan, Balti- 
more. 1827, Beauties of Byron, 8 Phil. 1829, Works (" includ- 
ing suppressed poems"), 4 Phil. 1830, Letters and Journals, 
edited by Thomas Moore, N.Y. 1832, Works (8 vs.), Phil. 
1834, Mazeppa, 5 N.Y. 1835, Works (in verse and prose), 6 N.Y. 
1836, Works (in verse and prose), N.Y. 1836, Conversations with 
the Countess of Blessington, 7 Phil. 1836, Works, Phil. 1837, 
Works (in verse and prose), N.Y. 1838, Works, Phil. 1839, Works, 
Phil. 1843, Works (4 vs.), Phil. 1844, Works, Phil. 1844, 
Hebrew Melodies, N.Y. 1846, Sardanapalus and Werner, 8 N.Y. 
1847, Works, N.Y. 1847, Childe Harold, Phil. 1848, Childe 
Harold, Phil. 1848, Werner, 8 N.Y. 1849, Tales and Poems 
("with illustrated engravings on steel"), 9 Phil. 1850, Works 
(4 vs.), Cincinnati. 10 185 1, Works (in verse and prose), Hartford. 
185 1, Selected Works (Hours of Idleness, English Bards, Hebrew 
Melodies), Boston. 185 1 (?), Works, Boston. 185 1, Correspon- 
dence with Lady Blessington, Cincinnati. 185 ?, Werner, 11 N.Y. 

1 Translated into terza rima by Lorenzo da Ponte, a well known teacher of Italian in 
New York. 

2 With portrait, as usual in complete editions. 
" It ran through at least ten editions. 

4 Lake's edition, several times reprinted. 

5 In The Republic of Letters, vol. i. 

'' Halleck's edition, several times reprinted. 

7 In Carey's Library of Choice Literature, vol. ii. 

8 In Modern Standard Drama Series. 

! > One of the good bits of book-making by that once famous house, Carey & Hart. 

111 Published by J. A. and U. P. James. The present head of this publishing house, Mr. 
D. L. James, has kindly furnished me with a memorandum: " If this was printed in Cin- 
cinnati it was from a set of stereotypes made in the East. My impression is that the sheets 
were printed in the East, probably in Philadelphia, with Cincinnati imprint, and then 
bound in Cincinnati." 

11 In French's Standard Drama. 



Appendix. 121 

185?, Sardanapalus (adapted by Charles Kean), N.Y. 1852, 
Works (in verse and prose), Hartford. 1853, Works (8 vs. in 4), 
Phil. 1853, Works, N.Y. 1853, Works (in verse and prose), 
Hartford. 1856, Don Juan, Phil. 185 ?, Works (10 vs.), Boston. 

1864, Childe Harold, Boston. 1864, Works (10 vs.), Boston. 

1865, English Bards, 1 N.Y. 1866, Works, Phil. 1868, Works, 
Phil. 

This list may be compared on the one hand with Gen. 
J. G. Wilson's privately printed list of American editions 
of Burns, on the other with the formidable lists of Euro- 
pean editions of Byron in the last volume (1904) of Mr. 
E. Hartley Coleridge's Poems of Byron. 

1 150 copies, printed half in half, 8° and 4°. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



(A) For Byron's influence, besides authors already 
noted, the following are important: — 

Elze's Biographie, chap, xi, 3d ed., 1886, Eng. trans., 1872. 
Koppel's Biographie, Berlin, 1903. 
Bleibtreu's Geschichte der englischen Litteratur. 
Taine's Histoire de la literature Anglaise. 

Robertson's Hist, of Ger. Literature (use index), Blackwood, 1902. 
Gervinus' Geschichte des igten Jahrhunderts, Bd. viii. 
Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age. 

G. Brandes, Hovedstromninger i det 19 de Aarhundredes Lit- 
teratur, Copenhagen, 1890-4. 
Dr. Otto Weddingen, Lord Byron's Einfluss auf die europdische 

Litteratur der Neuzeit. 
Dr. Otto Weddingen, Lord Byron und die russische Litteratur, 

in Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Littera- 

turen, lxix, 214. 
Byron i jego Wiek, Cracovie, 1896-7 (not translated, but 

if. report in Extrait du bulletin de V Academie des Sciences de 

Cracovie). 
Rudolph Gottschall, Byron und die Gegenwart, in Unsere Zeit, 

1866, p. 481 ff. 
A. Mickiewitz, Goethe und Byron in his Melanges, v. i, 1872. 
E. P. A. Hohenhausen, Rosseau, Goethe und Byron, Cassel, 1847. 
V. E. P. Charles, Vie et influence de Byron stir son epoche, in his 

Etudes stir V Angleterre au xix e siecle, 1850. 
Henri Blaze de Bury, Tableaux romantiques de litterature et d^art, 

essay, Lord Byron et Je Byronisme, Paris, 1878. 
W. J. Clark, Byron und die romantische Poesie in Erankreich, 1 

Leipzig, 1 90 1. 

1 I must acknowledge especial indebtedness to this very able dissertation. 



124 Bib liografthy . 

Victor Hugo, Sur lord Byron a propos de sa mort (a contemporary 
magazine article republished in his prose works). 

H. Kraeger, Lord Byrone Beziehungen zu Amerika, in Wissen- 
schaftliche Beilage zur Allgemeine Zeitung, 1897, nos. 58-62. 

Washington Irving, " Newstead Abbey," in Crayon Miscellany. 



(I?) For further contemporary criticism on American 
literature, throwing light on our crude conditions or our 
desire for literary independence, see, especially : — 

C. B. Brown, Preface to Edgar JLuntley, 1801. 

Fisher Ames, " Essay on American Literature," pub. after his 
death, in 1809. 

W. E. Channing, " Remarks on a National Literature " (apropos 
of a " Discourse concerning the Influence of America on the 
Mind," delivered, Oct. 18, 1823, "at the University in Phila- 
delphia," by C. J. Ingersoll) ; reprinted in his works. 

Edward Everett, "Progress of Literature in America/' 1824. 

John Neal, " American Writers" (in Blackwood's), 1824. 

Knapp, Lectures on American Literature, 1829. 

J. G. Whittier, Preface to Legends of New England, 183 1 ; (also 
his early reviews, as that of Evangeline, 1847). 

J. G. Verplanck, American History, Art, and Literature, 1833 ; 
(also his "American Scholar," 1836). 

T. Flint, " Literature in the United States " (in London Athe- 
nceum), 1835. 

R. W. Emerson, "The American Scholar," 1837. 

[?] Commencement Oration on " American Literature," Cam- 
bridge, 1839. 

W. G. Simms, Views and Revieivs, 1845. 

H. T. Tuckerman, Thoughts on the Poets, 1846. 

E. P. Whipple, Essays and Reviews, 1848. 

E. A. Poe, Collected Reviews and Essays (his lecture, " The 
Poets and the Poetry of America," was delivered first in 1843). 

T. J. Buckingham, Personal Memoirs, 1853. 



Bib Hog raphy . 125 

Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, first edition, 1855. 

H. B. Wallace, Literary Criticisms, 1856. 

V. E. P. Charles, Etudes sur la litterature et les mceurs des Anglo- 
Americains, du xix* siede, 185 1 ; (note also the prejudiced 
accounts of travels by Englishmen, and the work on the 
American People, by the German, F. von Raumer). 

Besides the above, much may be gleaned from the 
prefaces and biographical notices of the Anthologists, from 
the book reviews in magazines, and from magazine articles 
on American literature, for which latter see Poole's Index. 
Much bibliographical information may be found in Prof. 
B. Wendell's Literary History of America, and in Prof. 
W. P. Trent's History of American Literature. See also, 
American Authors (a bibliography), 1795-180)5, by P. K. 
Foley, Boston (printed for subscribers, 1897) ; Check 
Lists of Bibliographies, Catalogues, Reference Lists of 
Authorities of American Books and Subjects, P. L. Ford, 
Brooklyn, 1889 ; and the well known Dictionary of Amer- 
ican Authors, by Oscar Fay Adams. 

( C) The following Anthologies are the most important 
for American minor verse, and some of it is very minor : — 

Beauties of Poetry, British and American (nineteen native writers 
represented), Matthew Carey [Phil.], 1791. 

American Poems, Richard Alsop. (This was the first, and the 
last of a proposed series). Litchfield, Conn., 1793. 

Columbian Muse, N.Y., 1794. 

Specimens of the American Poets (" with critical notices "), London, 
1822. 

Columbian Lyre, Glasgow, 1828. 

Specimens of American Poetry, S. Kettel, Boston, 1829. 

American Commonplace Book of Poetry, G. B. Cheever, Boston, 183 1. 



126 Bib liograph y . 

The Rosary (more than half the selections are from American 

writers), T. J. Buckingham, Boston, 1834. 
The Poets of America, Keese [Boston ?], 1839. 
Selections from the American Poets, W. C. Bryant, N.Y., 1840. 
Poets and Poetry in America, R. W. Griswold, 1842. (The Female 

Poets made their debut under Mr. Griswold's chaperonage in 

1849.) 
Cyclopedia of American Literature, E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck, 

N.Y., 1855. 
A Library of American Literature, Stedman and Hutchinson, 1887 

(vol. xi, 1890). 



VITA. 



THE author was born in Plainfield, N.J., January 25, 1876. 
He was a pupil in the public schools of that city till at the 
age of sixteen he removed with his parents to Bolton, Mass., 
where he completed his preparation for college alone. He en- 
tered Boston University, attending chiefly classes in English, 
Latin and Philosophy, under Professors Butler, Lindsay and 
Bowne, and graduated (A.B.) in 1898. He was then a student 
of the same subjects at Harvard University under Professors 
Kittredge, Baker, Morgan, Marsh and James, and received the 
A.M. degree in 1899. During a portion of the same year he was 
instructor in Latin in Boston University. In the fall of 1900 he 
went, as Fellow of Boston University, to Gottingen. Germany, 
where he heard Professors Morsbach, Heine, Roethe and Meyer, 
in English, Germanics and Comparative Philology. In 190 1-2 
he attended, at Bonn, lectures on English, Germanics and Philos- 
ophy, under Professors Trautmann, Biilbring, Wilmanns, Litzmann 
and Erdmann. In 1902-3, as Fellow in English of Columbia 
University, he attended lectures by Professors Price, Trent and 
William H. Carpenter. The author is glad of this opportunity 
to express to his teachers his sincere and lasting gratitude. 



ERRATA. 



PAGE. 




2 


For Crecentius 


read Crescentius. 


3 


" Cela 


" Cela. 


4 


" sentimentidi 


" sentimentidi. 


5 


" Frederich 


" Frederik. 


5 


" Heinrich 


■' Henrik. 


5 


" Digde 


'• Digte. 


7 


" rapelle 


" rappelle. 


9 


" Werner 


" Wiener. 


10 


" Decembre 


" Decembre. 


10 


(and passim) For bonrgeoise 


*' bourgeois. 


11 


For Benjamin Thompson 


" Benjamin Thomson. 


11 


" Blackstone 


" Blackmore. 


24 


'" Sir Charles Moore 


" Sir John Moore. 


32 


" much and 


" much. 


38 


" Atheneum 


" Athenaeum. 


39 


' ' Fables 


' ' Fable. 


40 


" Cossens 


" Cozzens. 


44 


" England and Switzerland 


" Subjugation of Switzerland 


47 


" Greenville 


" Grenville. 


59 


" rather, facile 


" rather facile. 


Gl 


" J liven ali a 


'* Juvenilia. 


61 


" closely 


" close. 


C7 


Dele " the spot on." 




67 


For Grisnold 


read Griswold. 


71 


and passim) For Matthews 


" Mathews. 


75 


Insert "many " after "been said." 


76 


Substitute a period for the comma after "are his." 


77 


For Advertizer 


read Advertiser. 


79 


" Stanzas to Cadiz 


" The Girl of Cadiz. 


81 


" Mrs. S. A. Lewis 


" Mrs. E. Anne Lewis. 




(She is identical with the 


lady mentioned on p. 83.) 


86 


For Peacock 


read Robert Pollock. 


90 


" imitations 


" imitation. 


94 


" thou has 


" thou hast. 


98 


" drugge 


" drudge. 


101 


" mastadons 


" mastodons. 


104 


" as Byron 


" than Byron. 


115 


" aimed at 


" sought. 


123 


" Melanges 


" Melanges. 


123 and 125 For Charles 


" Chasles. 


123 


For epoch 


' ' epoque. 


124 


" Byrone 


" Byrons. 


124 


" J. G. Verplanck 


" G. C. Verplanck. 









Lb/- ; 09 



BYRON AND BYRONISM 
IN AMERICA 



BY 



WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD, Ph.D. 




JReto gorfe 

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1907 



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